What's the REAL DEAL with Underscores in BIND8.X?

[Ray Galuszka]

On page 77 in Albitz/Liu's DNS & BIND 3rd Edition, the authors state that
underscores are not allowed in hostnames.  However, on the next page they
talk about how you can specify either fail, warn or ignore on the
check-names option.

I have LOTS of underscores in my BIND4.x environment now and we're migrating
to BIND8.  I set up our test server to "ignore" on the check-names option
and the thing is resolving these names with no problem!

The question is: if I set this ignore option and use underscores in
hostnames and aliases, what might I break??   It sure beats putting out
fires later because some server on my network somewhere expects an
underscore that I changed to a hyphen in a hostname.


Ray Galuszka
Van Kampen Funds
mailto:galuszr at vankampen.com