CNAME map to localhost question

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:19 PM -0700 5/31/01, Luke Hassell wrote:

>  Here's the trick: due to tunneling, clients will connect to their
>  localhost (127.0.0.1) for the tunnel to work (specifically http
>  traffic).  I would like to add a CNAME record in corporate
>  DNS that points a meaningful name to "localhost".  This would
>  provide a better URL than
>
>     http://localhost:1234

	So, you have a CNAME record in the DNS called 
"securetunnel.yourcompany.com", which resolves to "localhost." and 
the IP address 127.0.0.1, right?  Then you hand out URLs like:

		http://securetunnel.yourcompany.com:1234

	Right?

	No, there is nothing I can think of that would cause a problem 
with this.  You are only affecting forward resolution (not reverse 
resolution), and it's a CNAME record, so any application that may do 
validation by hostname should figure out that it should canonicalize 
the name first and get "localhost.", which should already match what 
you've got now.


	The only potential issue I can see is that if this is done on 
your public DNS, you might expose (to people who might want to break 
into your network) a route that might be used to more easily by-pass 
the other network security you have.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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