Is address forwarding via dns A record possible?

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2000 at 07:36:13AM +1000, Robert Chalmers wrote:
> An acquaintance told me that dns forwarding is possible,
> quote.
> ........................
> I have been told that is how web site forwarding works. (web site forwarding
> meaning someone types in a domain name and is forwarded to a specified url)
> A lot of companies use this to provide customers with use of there domain
> name without having to actually do any hosting they just forward the domain
> name to a free hosting service. DNS can actually do this as an internal
> function with an a record but you need an ip address. What I need is when
> the dns is queried it will check to see what url it should point to not an
> ip address.
> .............................................
> 
> This sounds a bit strange to me, as a server can only be responsible for
> it's own zones can't it?
> Thanks
> Robert

There is some confusion here, perhaps.

DNS does not handle URLs at all.

DNS does allow you to take a name, e.g., web.myweb.com, and either make
it the same IP address as another machine, or tell you to take another
name, and use that name in any lookups that have to be done.

For instance, say that www.yourweb.com is 100.0.0.1.  Then I could say
in the "myweb.com" DNS files:

web	IN A	100.0.0.1

and then web.myweb.com would always have that IP address.  Even if you
changed yours.

Or, I could say:

web	IN CNAME	www.yourweb.com.

and then any lookups of address or other attributes would first find
that web.myweb.com is "really" www.yourweb.com; and then they would
look up the appropriate values for the latter address.  This also means
that web.myweb.com could NOT have any attributes of its own, such as
its own address, MX [mailer] record, name server, or anything else.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO/OSIS Computer Support					EMT-B
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