cannot access .local domain/intranet site when connected to the VPN after the IOS 8 update.

Did you confirm your DNS servers have SOA configured for .local, not just domain.local?

Pete boston: Thank you very much!

I can confirm that creating a SOA record solved the problem.

But should Apple be doing this? What's the problem with asking the DNS server about .local domains too, even if no SOA record was set..? Why the sudden change? And why did they already try this several times and always reverted to the old behavior?

Anyway. Thanks to Pete boston, my setup is working again! 🙂

Update: Btw. I only configured SOA for domain.local and everything works fine now. Should I nevertheless add a SOA entry for local. ?

I don't think there is anything wrong with them enforcing correct DNS behavior. Unfortunately I don't think the change was documented anywhere. It appears they have been talking about this for OS X for years:

Mac OS X v10.4, 10.5, 10.6: How to look up ".local" hostnames via both Bonjour and standard DNS

Good question, I thought you also needed to have SOA configured for .local, not just domain.local for a correct configuration.

I'm glad you guys have your solution. I must be missing something. When I go to the properties of my zone and click on the SOA tab, the settings are configured. Is there something else that needs to be done?

Pete, seems as though I didn't wait long enough. It is working now. Thank you. Just to reiterate for anyone else I did in fact need to create SOA's for the .local not just the domain.local. Thank you all for your help.

Huge, huge, huge thanks to Pete. I was not looking forward to having to haul my laptop around with me at my next conference.

I have SOA records setup on all our domains by default in SBS 2008 and still cannot resolve any DNS names via VPN on any iOS 8 device.

Don't see why infrastructure changes should be made in order to support Apple's crap programming. It's clearly a bug that needs resolving by Apple. Local domains resolved perfectly up until iOS 8. Something's changed; but why? Haven't Apple heard of the term... "if it's not broken, don't fix it"...?

That said, if Apple meant to change the way that DNS works in iOS 8 with local domains, why haven't they announced the change prior to releasing iOS 8, advising customers to ensure an SOA record exists before upgrading to iOS 8?

Massive thumbs up to Pete Boston!! To think I even had some DNS traces showing the IOS device asking for the .local SOA record too, I didn't even notice....

Thank you!

Hi, have the same problem. We are running MS DNS and have the SOA record present. But we still can't lookup domain.local.

Any one else have this problem and have a solution?

When you create a forward lookup zone in Windows it automatically creates an SOA record for that zone. The issue here is that in addition to the 'mydomain.local' zone, you need to set up a 'local' zone as well.

All. Our domain is currently set up as my.domain.local and we set setup a forward zone called local and Windows created the SOA and we still cannot connect to local. NSLOOKUP pulls response to domain.local bot not .local. What settings do you have or other steps that I may be missing for this setup...r

I didn't do anything beyond creating the zone. Has it propagated to all of your DNS servers? Maybe the iPad was querying one that did not have a copy of the zone yet.

Yes. We added to the zone to DNS and saw that it replicated to the DNS servers that we were using.

Note.. I am using an IOS 8 iPhone on our .local, not an iPad. The DNS that we added the zone to and another that it replicated to was in the wifi network settings. (cellular disabled for this test).

Tried adding a zone called "local" to our Windows DNS server. Makes no difference.

Apple, make a useful change to iOS please and fix THIS issue! I'm not interested in curves or linear effects; issues like this should take priority.