round robin on PTR records in 8.1.2

[Barry Margolin]

In article <Pine.GSO.4.05.9906250952020.7570-100000 at tkuwsup17>,
Richard Roberto  <robertri at sag.japan.ml.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>This seems not to be working here, but I'm not sure why.  I have three A
>records a la:
>
>webcache	IN	A	1
>webproxy	IN	A	1
>fontserver	IN	A	1
>
>and in the reverse zone:
>
>1	IN	PTR	webcache
>1	IN	PTR	webproxy
>1	IN	PTR	fontserver
>
>If I query the address I always get back the same domain label but I would
>have thought the responses would be rotated like A records are.  This
>isn't currently an issue but it might be.  Some of our software does
>require reverse lookups to work and if a host has more than one A record
>for it, it looks like it may not.  Eventually a list of servers will all
>respond to each of these names (so they'll all be round robin A records
>as well), which is supported for sure, and works fine (forward lookups,
>that is).  Currently though, this is just one machine with three names.

For some reason, BIND doesn't do round-robin of PTR records.

But why should it matter?  When you do a reverse lookup the server returns
*all* of the PTR records.  When your software is doing its reverse lookup
check, it should check whether any of the PTR records match the name it was
given.  This would be necessary whether or not round-robin is done, since
you can't predict whether the name you care about will be first.

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