A records point to a domain

[Barry Margolin]

In article <MPG.138db838d863c2519896aa at news2lo.highwayone.net>,
Stewart Tolhurst  <stewart.tolhurst at vodafone.net> wrote:
>I've noticed that a lot of sites can be accessed by the domain name only 
>- there is no need for a full hostname (e.g. http://yahoo.com goes to the 
>same site as http://www.yahoo.com).  On further investigation into this 
>is appears that an A record has been set up for the domain:
>
>from dig yahoo.com
>
>yahoo.com A (Address) 204.71.200.243
>
>Is this kind of thing RFC compliant?  Does it raise any issues or cause 
>any potiential problems?

There's nothing in the specification that says that a name with an SOA
record can't have other records.  If there can be an MX record for
yahoo.com, why do you think there couldn't be an A record?  The only record
type that is incompatible with other records is CNAME (either a name is an
alias or it isn't).

>It seems to me that this breaks every DNS convention - but it appears to 
>work.

What DNS conventions are you talking about?

>Does anyone have any resources/information on this?

It's perfectly normal.

-- 
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.