CNAME Error

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Gabriele" == Gabriele Piroddi <gabrielepiroddi at yahoo.it> writes:

    Gabriele> The class "IN" is missing.  So, the two record shoud be:

    Gabriele> www IN CNAME dovecanyontech.com.  
    Gabriele> ftp IN CNAME dovecanyontech.com.

Nope. The spec says that when the name, class, type or TTL for some RR
are missing, their values are inherited from the last RR that defined
them. So the missing "IN" class doesn't matter as it was defined in
earlier records in the zone file.

The problem with the OP's zone is not the CNAMEs. It's the TXT and RP
records which follow them.

These have the name ftp.whatever-the-domain-is, which is inherited
from the last RR to set the domain name: the CNAME for ftp. So the TXT
and RP records are for ftp.whatever-the-domain-is rather than the
actual domain name, which was probably what was intended. However
since ftp.whatever-the-domain-is already exists as a CNAME, it cannot
exist as any other record type. That means these TXT and RP records
are illegal and that's why the zone gets rejected. If they'd been
placed before the CNAME entries, all would have been well.

The OP wouldn't have had this problem if he/she explicitly used fully
qualified, dot-terminated domain names throughout the zone file. This
avoids these sorts of problems when an oversight with an earlier entry
in the zone file changes the semantics of later RRs in the file.

    >> www            CNAME   dovecanyontech.com.
    >> ftp            CNAME   dovecanyontech.com.
    >> 
    >>                IN      TXT     "Location: Yann's Office"
    >>                IN      RP      jim.dovecanyontech.com. .