Kluge delegation of a single host

[Barry Margolin]

In article <492485759.929991132844.JavaMail.qtran at hutch.East.Sun.COM>,
 <Christine.Tran at East.Sun.COM> wrote:
>We have a TIS BSD box running 4.9.3-P1.  I found this kluge and wonder if this
>is workable in 8.2.  There's a server farm of 10 servers distributed 
>geographically, they all answer to www.jelly.com.  They used Cisco Distributed 
>Director (CDD) which figures out which of the servers are alive and return the 
>closest IP to the querry source based on shortest route and trip time.  The 
>kluge is in the zone file, which seems to delegate the *host* www.jelly.com
>to the CDD ( I have only seen delegation of a zone, not a single host but
>I don't see why it shouldn't work.)
>
>www.jelly.com.  IN      NS      CDD.jelly.com.
>cdd.jelly.com.  IN      A       1.2.3.4

Sure, this is fine.  DNS servers don't know that this is a host, it's just
a delegation of a name.  There's nothing wrong with a zone that only
contains a single name in it, which is the same as the zone name.

Consider this: what's the difference between delegating www.jelly.com from
the jelly.com domain and only defining an A record for www.jelly.com, and
delegating xxx.com from the com domain and only defining an MX record for
xxx.com?  There are probably lots of domains with the latter configuration.
As far as the DNS protocol is concerned, there's no difference.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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