Let's walk through a safe, reversible setup using Acrylic DNS Proxy.
Goal: Make printer.homelab point to 192.168.1.50.
Step 1: Download & Install Go to the official Acrylic DNS Proxy website. Download the installer. During installation, choose "Install as a Windows service."
Step 2: Locate the Hosts File
Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Acrylic\.
Open AcrylicHosts.txt as Administrator. tld patcher
Step 3: Add Your Custom TLD Add this line at the bottom:
192.168.1.50 printer.homelab
(Note: Do NOT add www.printer.homelab unless you specifically want that subdomain)
Step 4: Configure the TLD Passthrough
Open AcrylicConfigurationUI.exe. Go to the "Advanced" tab. In the "Local TLD types" box, add: homelab
Why? This tells Acrylic: "Do not forward .homelab requests to the internet. Keep them local." Let's walk through a safe, reversible setup using
Step 5: Change Your Computer's DNS
Step 6: Restart the Service
Open Services.msc, find "Acrylic DNS Proxy," restart it.
Open CMD. Type: ping printer.homelab
You should see replies from 192.168.1.50. Success.
To Reverse: Change your network DNS back to 8.8.8.8 and uninstall Acrylic. (Note: Do NOT add www
If a real TLD (like .dev or .app) suddenly becomes registered by ICANN, your patched local version will conflict. Your computer will try to resolve newcool.app locally, fail, and you will think the website is down when it isn't. This is called "DNS poisoning yourself."
If you run pfSense, DD-WRT, or a Raspberry Pi as a DNS server, Dnsmasq is the ultimate TLD patcher. Add address=/homelab/192.168.1.100 to your config, and the entire network uses your custom TLD.
Malware loves TLD Patchers. A virus can silently patch your system to add a rule: evil.phishing -> 127.0.0.1. Then it edits your browser's shortcut to load evil.phishing. You think you are safe, but you aren't.