non existent host/domain

[Barry Margolin]

In article <Pine.BSF.4.21.0004271111510.2733-100000 at manatee.mammalia.org>,
R Joseph Wright  <rjoseph at speakeasy.org> wrote:
>You mean I'm supposed to create an A record for my zone?  

Only if you want to use the domain name as a hostname.

>							   None of the
>configurations I've looked at have anything like that.  What if I had more
>than one nameserver on different machines with different addresses?  Would
>each of those also have an A record for the zone with its own address?

The address of the domain has absolutely nothing to do with the addresses
of the nameservers.  These days, the domain name's address usually points
to the web server, so that people can say http://mammalia.org as a synonym
for http://www.mammalia.org.

>Since the zone is already implied on the left side of the A record entry,
>would it look something like this?:
>			IN	A	216.231.50.6

It depends on where you put it.  If a line is indented, the implied name is
the name from the previous line.  So the above line should be put after the
SOA record but before the line that begins with "ns".

>I'm probably missing something totally obvious, but this just seems a bit
>weird. 

I'm not sure what you find weird about it.  You asked nslookup to show you
the A record for the name "mammalia.org", didn't you (unless you use the
-type= argument, the default type is A)?  You haven't created an A record
for that name, so what did you expect it do show?  Utilities like nslookup
are very literal -- they show you precisely what you ask for, they don't
try to guess what you want.

>> >***Here is db.mammalia***
>> >*************************
>> >
>> >; Definition of zone mammalia.org
>> >mammalia.org.	IN  	SOA  manatee.mammalia.org.  rjoseph.mammalia.org. (
>> >		2000260401  	;  Serial (date,  2 digit version of day)
>> >		86400		;  refresh  (1 day)
>> >		7200		;  retry  (2 hours)
>> >		8640000		;  expire  (100 days)
>> >		86400 )		;  minimum  (1 day)
>> >; Name servers
>> >		IN	NS	ns
>> >ns		IN	A	216.231.50.6
>> >; MX records
>> >		IN 	MX	10  manatee.mammalia.org.
>> >; Hosts
>> >manatee		IN  	A  	216.231.50.6
>> >; Aliases
>> >www		IN	CNAME   manatee	
>> >; System Information
>> >manatee		IN	HINFO	"AMD K6-2/450"	"FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE"


-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.