DNS loop

Jeffrey Keil keilj_33 at yahoo.com
Thu May 20 15:22:14 UTC 2004


Greetings:

I just started working here and the last person that set up the DNS
servers did some very strange things in the configuration files. There
is one machine whose name is osx, but it is also known on the network
as mail and ns1.

The SOA line reads:

@       IN      SOA     mail.gcs-usa.com. dalton.gcs-usa.com.

The same machine is listed as one of the DNS servers with the
following line:

IN    NS    ns1.gcs-usa.com.

He has the different machine names and the same IP address listed
three times in the list of addresses for canonical names:

mail                    IN      A       192.168.1.32    ; Mail Server
for GCS
osx                     IN      A       192.168.1.32    ; Mail Server
for GCS
ns1                     IN      A       192.168.1.32    ; DNS Primary
Server

I didn't think you were allowed to use the same IP address more than
once. I'm a little surprised that BIND allows something like this in
the configuration file. Wouldn't this create a DNS look?

I think the best way to fix this would be to change the DNS server
designation from ns1.gcs-usa.com to mail.gcs-usa.com with a line like
this:

IN    NS    mail.gcs-usa.com.

I could then list the two other names (osx and ns1) as aliases with
lines that look like this:

osx                   IN   CNAME   mail
ns1                   IN   CNAME   mail

This way if there is anything looking for "osx" or "ns1", it would be
referred back to the "mail" name.

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Thanks,
Jeff


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