Wildcards?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <00d801bf0155$ceadae40$b477a8ce at acmebw.com>,
Cricket Liu <cricket at acmebw.com> wrote:
>Jason Brown <jason.brown at kingston-internet.net> wrote in message
>news:<7rimj6$vi6$1 at newsreader3.core.theplanet.net>...
>> I wanted to add a wild card of www.* within my domain, but it doesnt work,
>> an nslookup for www.anything.karoo.net should have shown a result of CNAME
>> brownbear, but instead it cannot resolve it.
>> A nslookup of www.*.karoo.net does show a result of CNAME brownbear.
>> why didnt it work?
>>
>> I did get around this by just adding:
>> *                                                   28800   CNAME
>> brownbear
>>
>> Within my zone file. This works but not as I wanted it!!! why didnt www.*
>> work?
>
>The wildcard must be the leftmost label in the domain name, according to RFC
>1034.

This is true according to the spec.  However, one of our customers
discovered that BIND allows CNAME records (but not other record types) for
names in the form XXX.*.  For instance, we have a CNAME record for mail.*
in the hamptoninn.com zone, and it works:

; <<>> DiG 2.2 <<>> mail.XXX.hamptoninn.com a 
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6
;; flags: qr rd ra; Ques: 1, Ans: 2, Auth: 2, Addit: 2
;; QUESTIONS:
;;	mail.XXX.hamptoninn.com, type = A, class = IN

;; ANSWERS:
mail.XXX.hamptoninn.com.	86400	CNAME	mail.hamptoninn.com.criticalpath.net.
mail.hamptoninn.com.criticalpath.net.	3594	A	209.229.28.193

They said they wrote the BIND developers asking whether this is the result
of a bug or deliberate design.  And since they desperately want to continue
using this feature, they suggested that it be written up as an RFC proposal
to make it legitimate.

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