Wildcard hosts

[Barry Margolin]

In article <ecnvbu$c4c$1 at sf1.isc.org>, "AF" <af.at.work at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> I was wondering if someone would mind highlighting any 'issues' with
> using wildcard hosts. 
> 
> ie: *.mydomain.com

The most common problem is that it prevents getting proper name lookup 
errors from applications that automatically append the local domain 
name.  E.g. if you try to look up gooogle.com (let's pretend this 
doesn't exist), and when the application gets an error from DNS it 
retries this as gooogle.com.mydomain.com, this will return a result 
because of the wildcard.  So the user never gets told that he misspelled 
google.com.

Things are even worse for applications and libraries that append the 
default domain BEFORE trying the name as given.  Then even if you type 
google.com correctly, it will look up google.com.mydomain.com, and 
return the address from the wildcard rather than the correct address of 
google.com.  And unfortunately, there are still quite a few applications 
that work like this (Windows NSLOOKUP seems to be one of them).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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