Sites that points their A Record to localhost

Eduardo Bonsi beartcom at pacbell.net
Mon Jan 13 18:25:00 UTC 2014


> On 1/10/14, 8:36 PM, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
> There seems to be a pile of misconceptions here.

Joseph,

1. No one from this list that answered to my original question actually showed any degree of confusion, (including myself). There were only observations on the subject, nothing more...

2. All your (6) observations on the subject are very basic 101 stuff and have very little to do with what I originally asked. I have not contested or said what a person can and cannot do with their own Bind configuration. 

3. What I originally asked and what I also suspected to be the answer, (has already been answered here), so I am not going to repeat myself in those things you actually missed.

Thanks for your views!

Eduardo
 

 
--
Eduardo Bonsi
System Admin
BEARTCOMMUNICATIONS
beartcom at pacbell.net


________________________________
 From: Joseph S D Yao <jsdy at tux.org>
To: bind-users at lists.isc.org 
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2014 8:36 PM
Subject: Re: Sites that points their A Record to localhost
 

On 2014-01-10 15:01, Eduardo Bonsi wrote:
...
> It seems like they have their domain configuration A Record pointed
> to the localhost. We all know that the localhost is not routable
> outside of the internet. Therefore I am sure their website cannot
> resolve out of the 127.0.0.1.
> In addition to that, it is possible that this is happening only here
> because of the way our Server configuration is setup in the OS X to
> bring the resolver to the localhost first before it can go out to the
> distributed domains/websites through the Apache conf.
...


There seems to be a pile of misconceptions here.

(1) There is no requirement at all that a domain name have an A record. It does not have to resolve to an IP address at all.  It only has to have an SOA record and an NS record (preferably more than one); and not even that, if it is a subdomain that is not a separate zone.

(2) There is no requirement that a domain name refer to the Web site for that domain.  I personally don't like that (for no special reason), and neither apparently does the owner of this domain, who forces people to go to the trouble of typing in www.p3net.net to get to his or her Web site.  Incidentally, there is no requirement that the domain name refer to a mail server, either (which used to be common before the Web existed), or to an FTP server, or to a Telnet server, or to a nuclear reactor control device.  Or to anything.

(3) However, any name MAY resolve to any IP address, routable or not.  That doesn't mean there's anything useful, or even related to that domain, at that IP address.

(4) "127.0.0.1" is the IP equivalent of the English language word "me". If I say, "me", I am referring to myself.  If you say, "me", you are referring to yourself.  It cannot be used to direct anyone to somewhere else.  In fact, some use it to deflect probers AWAY from themselves, and back on the prober's own server.  (E.g., if I wanted to probe "p3net.net", my server would be probing itself!)

(5) 127.0.0.1 is not among the IP addresses mislabeled as "unroutable". It is always routable.  To right here.  Well, for you, right there.

(6) Just because OS X has 127.0.0.1 as the resolver has no effect on what that resolver returns.  Don't confuse the concepts.

I think there were some others, but it's getting late.

Joe Yao
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