question about multiple CNAMEs?

[Edward Lewis]

At 10:29 +1000 6/26/07, Mark Andrews wrote:

>	Go read RFCs 1033, 1034 and 1035.  From them it is clear that a
>	CNAME is supposed to be singular.

The purpose of the CNAME is to allow you to have one domain name 
really mean another one.  Kind of like aliases in a file system, if 
you something that is UNIX-like "ln -s alias file".  When you edit 
the alias, you are really editing the original file.

There was a time in the history of DNS that got a little permissive 
in the way the protocol was implemented.  At the time it was cool to 
see DNS as a low cost load balancer and let a CNAME redirect a query 
to one of many alternate names.  The DNS isn't good at a lot of 
things, including load balancing, it's only good for a strict lookup. 
Lookup a name, a CNAME might redirect you to one other name (and so 
on for a bit), and you get the one answer.  Load balancing is a much 
harder job than round robin answers.

I'm following up to Mark's answer because I don't think the base RFCs 
are clear about *anything*. ;)

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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

Sarcasm doesn't scale.