Pointing a domain name at a host through some sort of alias/CNAME

[sdean at ulster.net]

Some domains will resolve to an actual host (like yale.edu), others
(like harvard.edu) do not or do a sort of halfway resolution (that
doesn't work in reverse), like ibm.com (whose numeric IP reverse
resolves to www.ibm.com, tsk, tsk).
Myself, I think it's a Bad Idea to have an actual host that answers to
the same symbolic name as the domain....but our college's former
administrator did so ages ago.

Now I wish transfer the services of the old wombat.edu
host-with-the-same-name-as-the-domain (domain is wombat.edu, and there
is a host wombat.edu...it's a login server) to a new server, named
shell.wombat.edu.  Everything is set to go, but I find I can't have a
CNAME record like this:
wombat.edu   CNAME     shell.wombat.edu
Seems BIND finds this illegal, and I can sortkinda see why

Is there some way to finesse this, some unugly way to do this.  I would
really rather NOT have two A records with the same numeric IP
(wombat.edu and shell.wombat.edu); that's ugly and illegal and causes
problems with spoofing protection.  I don't want to give the A record
for the numeric to wombat.edu and have shell.wombat.edu be a CNAME,
though that is less ugly to my sensibilities.

I mean, you can have a domain name with MX records and no A record, why
not a domain name with CNAME and no A record or some equivalent
thereof.