special characters in zone files

[Jeff Lightner]

Thanks for your response.  

It seems you missed the fact I had already tried to escape with the \.

RFC1035 did indeed contain an example of using \ to do escaping in the
SOA but this was in the MNAME even though the comment below it implies
it would work for the RNAME.  To restate what I previously said using \
in the RNAME didn't help.  

My SOA record:
@               IN SOA  dswadns1.water.com.
domain\.technician.water.com. (
                                2006012801      ; serial
                                10800           ; refresh
                                3600            ; retry
                                604800          ; expire
                                86400 )         ; default_ttl

In the above dswadns1.water.com. is the MNAME and
domain.technician.water.com is the RNAME.

However on doing a reverse lookup (this is an arpa in.addr zone file)
www.dnsstuff.com shows the address as domain at technician.water.com
instead of domain.technician at water.com. 
The pointer to specific RFCs was helpful though.  I'm a newbie to DNS
(inherited existing environment) and at least knowing this was the RNAME
gave me something more to Google on.  The only direct reference I found
to it failing was on MS Windows and their fix was an SP.  Since I'm
running Linux that isn't going to help.   Most other references
indicated as you did that escaping it with \ should work but it simply
doesn't seem to.  I couldn't find any example SOAs in which a \ had been
put in the RNAME.

Is it possible it's just that www.dnsstuff.com itself isn't properly
interpreting the RNAME?  Should an external site like that even see the
full entry rather than interpretation of it by named?  I'd have thought
it wouldn't. 

FYI:  Based on the comment mentioned in RFC1035 I did try putting quotes
around the entire RNAME rather than just the person portion as done
previously but this again broke the zone file.

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:bind-users-bounce at isc.org] On
Behalf Of Barry Margolin
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2006 1:07 AM
To: comp-protocols-dns-bind at isc.org
Subject: Re: special characters in zone files

In article <drdqbv$1j7r$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com> wrote:

> Is there a way to use special characters like the dot in the name so
> that it will properly equate the entry to domain.technician at water.com?

Special characters can be escaped with '\', so use 
domain\.technician.water.com.

> Googling and examining the Bind 9 manual didn't help.   I'm using Bind
> 9.2.1.

I'm pretty sure there's an example of it in RFC 1034 or 1035.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***