resolver search order question

[Norman P. B. Joseph]

Is this expected resolver behavior?  It doesn't fit my understanding,
but maybe my understanding is at fault.  The clients and servers in this
scenario are all BIND 9.2.4 under RHEL.

I have the following search order in a client's resolver configuration:

        search ctc.com ctcgsc.org ad.ctcgsc.org

and I have the following two RRs in our DNS space:

        aj-mail1.ctc.com.	MX	0 aj-mail1.ad.ctcgsc.org.
        aj-mail1.ad.ctcgsc.org.	A	10.x.x.x

If I look for an A record for an unqualified "aj-mail1" the query fails,
but if I fully qualify the name in the query it succeeds.  I would have
expected the resolver to append the domains in the "search" directive in
order to the query name until it found "aj-mail1.ad.ctcgsc.org".

I'm guessing that the resolver discovers the label "aj-mail1.ctc.com"
first, because of the order of domains in the "search" directive, but
since it is an MX record and not an A record the search fails, but the
resolver doesn't continue with the other search domains because of the
existence of the label.  Or something like that.

What's the correct behavior?

-norm




-- 
 Norman Joseph, System Engineer             joseph at ctc.com        IC|XC
 Concurrent Technologies Corporation         814/269.2633         --+--
 Information Systems Management Office (ISMO)                     NI|KA
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