Reverse DNS: Is it necessary?

[Danny Mayer]

At 04:04 PM 3/17/01, Studio 51 wrote:
>I asked my web host to fix the lack of reverse DNS for the domains they host
>for me, they told me that thier nameservers don't support reverse DNS. Is

All nameservers support reverse lookups. 

>this considered a misconfiguration?

It depends.  Either the people you talked to doesn't have a clue, they didn't
set up reverse domains, they haven't been delegated the addresses in the blocks
of addresses that they have been allocated, or they don't have a clue.

>  It's a dedicated host that will be
>running a spider program, so I would think that many hosts would try to
>perform a reverse DNS lookup on the spider, which will fail because of this.
>Are there any other areas this is likely to affect?

         You better make them aware of what you want to run as it will generate a
lot of network traffic and yes, the hosts may very well want to get the IP Name
from the IP Address of the system that you are using.

>I thought reverse DNS was a standard part of properly setting up a
>nameserver, am I wrong?

         You are correct.  If they don't want to do it, get yourself another ISP who
will do it.

         Danny