CNAME's failing to resolve properly

[Daniel Hawkins]

Just had a problem as follows

Domain with a single machine in it which I actually wanted to point at
someone else's machine

www.mydomain.co.uk        IN        CNAME
server.someoneelse.co.uk.

On my local machine if i use nslookup to query www.mydomain.co.uk it
returns the address or server.someoneelse.co.uk no bother! however if I
set server to be the actual authorative named server the query fails?

Why?

A bit more poking revealed that doing a simple query on
www.mydomain.co.uk was sending a res_nmkquery(......A) which was
failing? Even though there isn't a direct A record shouldn't my named
then go off and resolve the CNAME to get the A record for
server.someoneelse.co.uk??

If I did a set querytype=any then the outgoing query was
res_nmkquery(......ANY) and everything was hunkey dorey!!!!

Anyway I've removed the CNAME and just hard coded the IP as an A record
for now but I'd be interested in knowing what should happen when an A
query is sent but the host is actually a CNAME?

Dan