CName Terminology Question

[Sam Wilson]

In article <38F677E8.38EF9EC6 at tmca.com.au>, Stanley Liu
<stanley.liu at tmca.com.au> wrote:

> ... I was still not quite convinced why we
>have the CNAME construct - if we can do the same using A records, why
bother to have
>CNAMEs since they have so many restrictions.  ...  Then suddenly it clicked.
>
>CNAME is immensely useful in out of zone referral (correct terminology?).

It's useful for many kinds of service naming (except nameservers and mail
servers - grr!) because you can move the service around between systems
without having to mess about keeping PTR records consistent.  Having
multiple CNAMEs to provide a duplicated service would also have been
useful but that's turned out to be a risky issue unfortunately.

-- 
Sam Wilson
Network Services Division, Computing Services
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK