CNAME's failing to resolve properly

[Barry Margolin]

In article <38ECC860.51E26217 at lts.co.uk>,
Daniel Hawkins  <dan at lts.co.uk> wrote:
>Just had a problem as follows
>
>Domain with a single machine in it which I actually wanted to point at
>someone else's machine
>
>www.mydomain.co.uk        IN        CNAME
>server.someoneelse.co.uk.
>
>On my local machine if i use nslookup to query www.mydomain.co.uk it
>returns the address or server.someoneelse.co.uk no bother! however if I
>set server to be the actual authorative named server the query fails?
>
>Why?
>
>A bit more poking revealed that doing a simple query on
>www.mydomain.co.uk was sending a res_nmkquery(......A) which was
>failing? Even though there isn't a direct A record shouldn't my named
>then go off and resolve the CNAME to get the A record for
>server.someoneelse.co.uk??

Yes.

>If I did a set querytype=any then the outgoing query was
>res_nmkquery(......ANY) and everything was hunkey dorey!!!!
>
>Anyway I've removed the CNAME and just hard coded the IP as an A record
>for now but I'd be interested in knowing what should happen when an A
>query is sent but the host is actually a CNAME?

It would help if you hadn't changed thins and told us the real domains
involved.  Actually, maybe if you tell us what the real CNAME record used
to look like it might be possible to figure out what was going wrong.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.com
Genuity, Burlington, MA
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