Ignoring unqualified MX's ?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <8bge8r$vda$1 at newsflash.concordia.ca>,
Anne Bennett <anne at alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
>Now I'm confused.  Since time immemorial (well, OK, about a decade)
>I've been configuring all my name servers to answer authoritatively for
>  127.0.0.1 PTR localhost.
>and
>  localhost. A 127.0.0.1
>
>I'm *quite* sure that I read copious documentation and I'm supposed to
>be doing that.  Has practice changed?  Have I (and countless others)
>been misunderstanding the documentation for years?  Or am I
>misunderstanding your post just now?

The PTR record is commonly done, but the A record isn't.  For instance,
take a look at the sample named configuration in Chapter 4 of the DN&BIND
book.

Usually, the "localhost" name is entered as an A record in the local
domain.  When people type "localhost" as a hostname, the resolver typically
appends the local default domain, and it gets resolved to an address.

I suppose there are environments where you may need the localhost TLD A
record.  If you're using software that performs an IP spoofing check after
performing reverse resolution of 127.0.0.1, you need a correponding A
record.  However, you would probably do better in that case to have the PTR
record point to localhost.<yourdomain> rather than creating the localhost
TLD.

-- 
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.