The RFC or the reason why you can not create CNAME record for t he "root record"

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c9nb4i$275a$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 David Botham <DBotham at OptimusSolutions.com> wrote:

> > So you're saying that once done, no changes can be made?  That would 
> seem
> > to say that DNS cannot even evolve.  I don't believe that.  But I don't
> > want to get into the politics of IETF.  If I make it work, people will
> > use it, then someone will figure it needs to be standardized to make 
> sure
> > there is just one uniform way to accomplish what people obviously want 
> to
> > do.
> 
> I think what Jim is saying is that it can certainly be changed, however, 
> the amount of work required to do so is daunting. Probably so much so that 
> the average human will not care so strongly about the problem that they 
> would be willing to do what it takes put into affect their desired 
> changes.

In fact, DNS *does* evolve.  And there's actually a feature that was 
added a number of years ago that would be a much better solution than 
allowing CNAMEs along-side SOA records: SRV records.  If browsers made 
use of these, you could write:

_www._tcp.mycompany.com.     IN SRV 0 1 80 server.hostingcompany.com.
_www._tcp.www.mycompany.com. IN SRV 0 1 80 server.hostingcompany.com.

SRV records were designed to address this problem directly, as well as 
providing related features such as multiple servers with weighting and 
priority.

The only advantage that the suggestion of "fixing CNAMEs" has over this 
is that there are far fewer servers than browsers, so it could be easier 
to phase in that sort of change.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***