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Prepartion

Depending on your system and browser configuration, TAO Community Edition may requires additional step to run successfully.

In this guide, we will check:

  • Name resolution for TAO Community Edition
  • Browser preferences
  • Certificate authority warning

Name resolution

About name resolution

Editing /etc/hosts is the simpliest method to ensure containers can be addressed with a named host rather than IP address.

For more informations and alternative methods, check this documentation.

This step is not mandatory, however TAO Community Edition relies on host name resolution for internal routing.

If you deployed TAO Community Edition locally on your system using containers, you need to let know your browser that you are hosting such service, and how to find it. Relying on hosts file is a well-known method to achieve this.

By default, TAO Community Edition uses community.tao.internal domain to expose its services. If you are using another domain, you may need to update this domain accordingly in following instructions.

Edit /etc/hosts and add the following line if missing:

0.0.0.0 community.tao.internal

Edit C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the following line if missing:

0.0.0.0 community.tao.internal

Browser preferences

Some security features in modern browsers may alter how TAO Community Edition is running.

0.0.0.0 resolution

Following a security exploit, Mozilla introduce a new preference to disable 0.0.0.0 resolution.

This preference has been enforced since version 136 (released in 2025).

You can choose one of the following methods to get TAO Community Edition working with Firefox.

enable 0.0.0.0 resolution

If we keep 0.0.0.0 as resolution address, we may need to adjust this preference:

  1. Open Mozilla Firefox, and browse to about:config
  2. You will face a page Proceed with Caution, click on Accept the Risk and Continue
  3. Look for network.socket.ip_addr_any.disabled preference name, and toggle it to false (double-click on it)
resolve to 127.0.0.1

Instead of resolving to 0.0.0.0, we can use 127.0.0.1 (localhost address).

However, depending on several internal settings on your system, 127.0.0.1 may eventually be not reachable from your browser.

This browser is not known to face issues with its default settings.

No further configuration is required.

Certificate warning

Once TAO Community Edition is ready, you can open https://community.tao.internal/ in your browser.

However, you will certainly face an alert from your browser, warning that Certificate authority is not trusted in your system.

This alert is expected, and you may need to confirm in your browser that you want to continue browsing community.tao.internal.
Is this warning a threat?

For a short answer, no.

It is very common for a local application to use a self-signed certificate authority, which explain the warning from your browser.

For a detailled explaination

TAO Community Edition requires HTTPS communication to support advanced features, and HTTPS protocol relies on trust relationship between server and browser.

All modern browsers support TLS protocol, which ensure to authentify remote server based on a certificaction chain.

A certification chain uses a mathematical proof to verify a certificate signature from a trusted autority, and guarantee a server has been granted to declare a particular identity.

Browsers and systems keep an up-to-date list of trusted authority to verify their signature.

In our present case, TAO Community Edition cannot be verified to be trusted for two reasons:

  • We use a self-signed certificate authority which is by default not known, therefore not trusted by your browser
  • HTTPS server declares itself as community.tao.internal, a domain name scoped in .internal TLD which is by design not meant to be resolved publically. Without such resolution, its certificate chain cannot be signed by a trusted public certificate authority.

Failing to verify a trusted signature is not automatically a sign of compromission; it essentially means that your browser has not trusted the certificate authority used by the server, and that it cannot guarantee that you are connected to the server it pretends to be.

How to prevent this alert?

For more information, and methods to prevent such alert for your users, read this documentation.

To confirm this alert on Mozilla Firefox

  1. Click on Advanced... button
  2. In the section appearing below, click Accept the Risk and Continue button
Confirm TLS alert on Firefox

To confirm this alert on Google Chrome or Chromium

  1. Click on Advanced button
  2. In the section appearing below, click Proceed to community.tao.internal (unsafe) link
Confirm TLS alert on Chrome

What's next?