If you like me have a crappy ISP that for some strange reason has a record for the “local” domain in their DNS. (This is some thing that the avahi daemon is not fond of since it wants to handle that one by itself.) And you run dnsmasq on your server, like fx the Excito B3, there is a simple central solution to this.
Add the following line to your dnsmasq config file:
server=/local/8.8.8.8
(/etc/dnsmasq.d/bubba.conf on Bubba)
Which tells dnsmasq that it should forward any queries regarding the local domain to Google’s DNS which does not contain any “local” record.