Help: setting a CNAME record for a domain

[Danny Mayer]

Erik Aronesty wrote:

  > > At 8:12 AM -0800 2/25/01, Tal Dayan wrote:
  > > >Also, if we go with the patch approach, what about our outsourced
  > secondary
  > > >DNS servers, will they know how to handle this ?

No, they will reject the zone.

  >
  > >
  > > They should, if they follow the spec, reject the AXFR'ed zones as invalid
  > > due to errors.
  >
  > All versions prior to 8.2.2 will accept the AXFR'ed zones.  I think 8.2.3
  > rejects just the CNAME record itself for AXFR'ed zones - but I'm not sure.
  >

      But they were still failing, they just weren't telling you.

  >
  > >
  > > >And if this patch does not create a problem with the rest of the DNS
  > world,
  > > >how about submitting your patch to the Bind maintainers, asking to
  > include
  > > >this great feature with a runtime switch that enable / disabled it.
  > >

      It's the BIND maintainers telling you that what you are doing is wrong,
will break all DNS Servers and you don't understand and probably
haven't read the RFC's.

  >
  > > I would call that a waste of energy as I doubt a patch to break the RFC
  > > will be very likely to be included in the src tarball... ;-)
  >
  > Of course.  We'd have to submit a clarification to the RFC first.
  >

      No, you'd have to completely rewrite it, since your logic is flawed. The
IETF would then reject it for the same reason.

What you should be doing is creating a www record and have people use that.
Then you can use CNAME's.  You are going to an inordinate amount of trouble
to avoid having people type an additional four letters assuming that they don't
use a link, which doesn't care how long it is.  When HTTP servers were first set up
in the early 1990's, everyone used www.name.something as the name of the
server.  A records don't really belong in the domain RR set.

      If you really want to avoid this, why not just set up a cron job to notify
you if the IP address changes?  It could even change the record for you to point
to the new address!

          Danny