Hidden VPN/DNS Gem in Apple's iOS4.1 announcement today

I’ve been on-again, off-again fighting with getting my iPhone 4 to talk to a Cisco VPN concentrator to connect to a company internal network. The iPhone would connect, but it couldn’t resolve any names, but my iPad worked with no issues.Turns out, the problem was with iOS 4.0.x’s implementation of Multicast DNS. According to this IETF draft, ‘…Any DNS query for a name ending with “.local.” MUST be sent to the mDNS multicast address…’, which Apple took literally for iOS 4.

Published at September 2, 2010 ·  1 min read