Best Method

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Tue Feb 22 22:04:36 UTC 2000


>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Everland <reverland at orlando.com> writes:

    Robert> Which is a better method for writing out the zone
    Robert> files. Actually writing the domain out of putting a @. Or
    Robert> does it even matter.

It doesn't matter to the name server. It might matter to the people
who have to maintain the zone file and how they want it laid out is a
matter of religion. Some people like to depend on the name server to
automatically tack on the domain name, others don't. Some people like
their zone files to be as sparse and cryptic as possible, others
don't. It all depends on what works best for you and your colleagues.
And whoever eventually takes over from you as hostmaster.

If you use fully-qualified and dot-terminated names everywhere (my
personal preference!) you can't accidentally load the wrong data for
the wrong zone. Being this explicit - saying what you mean and meaning
what you say - is usually safer than relying on the name server to
automatically tack on the domain name or whatever. ie All the
resource records in the zone file for mydomain1.com have names ending
"mydomain1.com.", which stops that file from being accidentally loaded
for the mydomain2.com zone or whatever. This administrative error
wouldn't be caught if the zone file had names that were not
fully-qualified and dot-terminated. OTOH, this approach can be rather
verbose.



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