CNAME for main domain

[Danny Mayer]

At 05:46 PM 11/25/02, Kevin Darcy wrote:

>"Gregory J." wrote:
>
> > Is it valid to have the "main" (I call it that for inability to think
> > of a better word) domain in a zone a CNAME? This zone file for
> > example:
> >
> > $TTL 86400
> > @       IN      SOA     ns1.domain.com. admin.domain.com. (
> >                         2002112301      ; Serial, YYYYMMDDXX
> >                         3600            ; Refresh, 1 hour
> >                         1200            ; Retry, 20 minutes
> >                         2592000         ; Expire, 1 month
> >                         600 )           ; Minimum, 10 minutes
> >         IN      NS      ns1.domain.com.
> >         IN      NS      ns2.domain.com.
> >         IN      CNAME   host1
> > host1   IN      A       123.456.789.101
> >         IN      MX 10   host1
> >         IN      MX 20   host2
> > host2   IN      A       123.456.789.102
> >         IN      MX 10   host2
> >         IN      MX 20   host1
> >
> > Is the CNAME record correct? I set it up so that http://domain.com/
> > points to host1, which serves the organization's Web site. I could
> > have made it "IN A 123.456.789.101," but I didn't want to have two
> > mappings to the same IP -- it's untidy for reverse DNS.
>
>No, when a name owns a CNAME, it cannot legally any other record. The
>zone apex in your example owns an SOA and 2 NS records, so it cannot
>legally own a CNAME record.
>
>If you want the zone apex name to resolve to an address, you must use an
>A record for it rather than a CNAME. There's no problem making the
>"www" name an alias for the zone apex name, however, so that should fix
>your reverse-record "untidiness".

This really has nothing to do with the reverse-record. These are the forward
records. You can put whatever you want in the PTR records. In this case
you apparently want it to point back to the www name.

Danny



>- Kevin
>