can whois records be cnames?

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Mon Jul 19 20:29:21 UTC 1999


In article <4.1.19990719113851.026d03b0 at pop.sitescape.com>,
Chris Pressley  <chrisp at sitescape.com> wrote:
>I recently had NS records pointing to CNAMES. I learned this was a no-no,
>so I changed my NS records. Now I've remembered that my whois record for my
>domain has CNAMES listed. Does someone know if this is a problem?

Yes.  Hostnames in WHOIS turn into glue A records on the root servers.  If
they're CNAME records on the authoritative server, caching servers may pick
up both records, and then they won't know whether it's an alias or a real A
record.

I don't think I've seen actual operational problems that result from this,
but it's still a bad idea to leave this inconsistency around.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.


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