[Q] Catch-all host in DNS

Netfortius netfortius at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 12:10:22 UTC 2006


On Tuesday 17 January 2006 19:49, Kevin Darcy wrote:
> Netfortius wrote:
> >Could someone be kind enough to point me to some good documentation as to
> > how and what about catch-all host in DNS? I am interested in
> > fundamentals, as much as implementation.
> >
> >I have been suggested by a blog vendor to implement a catch-all host on my
> >name servers, but I am not sure how this would work, as far as the purpose
> >for such from a blog stand point (but this would be a second question,
> >unrelated to DNS, of course ;)).
>
> Depends on exactly what you mean by "catch-all host". If you mean just
> serving up an address for arbitrary-name-here.example.com, then you can
> implement that fairly simply using the wildcard feature of DNS, e.g. "*
> a 1.2.3.4" in the zonefile, assuming example.com is the origin. Anything
> that is explicitly defined in the example.com zone will override the
> wildcard entry.

Thanks for suggestions. I thought of being as simple as a wildcard, but the 
guys have advertised this to some folks at my end as "everything containing 
your name inside, with not yet registered domains" - which may be possible 
for some domain registrars who have taken upon themselves to register 
"related-names" (e.g. there is one company who seems to have registered tons 
of my<place-a-valid-domain-name-here>.com domains). Oh, well - need more 
research on their requirements and "promises" ;)... 

> If by "catch-all host" you mean that some community of clients resolves
> *all* non-existent names to a particular address, then the wildcard
> approach is not compatible with allowing those clients to resolve
> Internet DNS names, since it's not feasible to duplicate the entire
> Internet namespace in order to override the wildcard in all cases. This
> approach would only be useful on a small internal network, in which case
> you could just put the wildcard into the internal root zone and all
> other zones, if any, in the namespace.

This is an interesting idea, but - as you said - not applicable on my publicly 
exposed systems.

> - Kevin

Thx,
Stef



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