The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) reserves the use of the domain name label .local as a special-use domain name for hostnames in local area networks that can be resolved via the Multicast DNS name resolution protocol.[1] Any DNS query for a name ending with the label local must be sent to the mDNS IPv4 link-local multicast address 224.0.0.251, or its IPv6 equivalent ff02::fb. A domain name ending in .local may be resolved concurrently via other mechanisms, for example, unicast DNS.