external lookup question

[Kevin Darcy]

Kevin M Shortt wrote:

> I am pretty sure that it can't be done, but I figured
> I will ask to put to rest any of my second thoughts.
>
> Can an end user use command line tools to find out
> all the CNAME's associated to a given IP address?

No, unfortunately this is not something that DNS itself (or
BIND) handles well.

In our case, we store alias backreferences in an LDAP database (along
with a bunch of other non-DNS stuff) which we maintain in parallel with
the DNS database itself. This allows us to quickly show all aliases
pointing to a particular A record in the GUI, and to automatically
delete/change aliases when A records are deleted or renamed, in order to
prevent "dangling" aliases. Of course, we're dealing with a closed
system here (internal root architecture with a common maintenance
platform): on the Internet, for example, you don't have any way of
knowing whether there is an alias pointing to your A record in a zone
you don't even control (as Cricket pointed out in his response).


- Kevin