cnames & mx records on the root of a zone

[Kevin Darcy]

erik at zoneedit.com wrote:

> [Re: CNAME and MX records with the same owner name]

> Questions:
>
> 1) Does anyone know why it was necessary, as a part of the DNS protocol, to
> reject this information?

Thus spake RFC 1034 (Section 3.6.2):

> A CNAME RR identifies its owner name as an alias, and
> specifies the corresponding canonical name in the RDATA section of the
> RR.  If a CNAME RR is present at a node, no other data should be
> present; this ensures that the data for a canonical name and its aliases
> cannot be different.  This rule also insures that a cached CNAME can be
> used without checking with an authoritative server for other RR types.
>


> 2) Since the previous implementations of BIND complained but supported this
> info and it seems that the DNS clients also supported it, is it possible to
> set a flag in the conf to get BIND8 to behave the same way as BIND4 did?

You want a flag that means, effectively, "flagrantly break RFC 1034"?!?!?!

You are certainly welcome to propose such an amendment to RFC 1034 on the
DNEXT WG mailing list ("namedroppers"). Don't expect the response to be as
temperate, though...


- Kevin