From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 26 20:26:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from nameserver.austclear.com.au (nameserver.austclear.com.au [192.83.119.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6C47337B422 for ; Thu, 26 Apr 2001 20:26:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ahl@austclear.com.au) Received: from tungsten.austclear.com.au (tungsten.austclear.com.au [192.168.70.1]) by nameserver.austclear.com.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA95937; Fri, 27 Apr 2001 13:26:23 +1000 (EST) Received: from tungsten (tungsten [192.168.70.1]) by tungsten.austclear.com.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA25642; Fri, 27 Apr 2001 13:26:22 +1000 (EST) Message-Id: <200104270326.NAA25642@tungsten.austclear.com.au> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.1.1 10/15/1999 To: "Christopher Leigh" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: *.example.net In-Reply-To: Message from "Christopher Leigh" of "Fri, 26 Oct 2001 22:16:26 EST." <000b01c15e95$c4bb6cc0$0101a8c0@contrec> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 13:26:22 +1000 From: Tony Landells Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I've never heard of anyone doing wildcard A records... Back in the days when people weren't very good at hiding hostnames in email they used to use wildcard MX records. They were generally considered a necessary evil, but people who had the skill were advised to hide the hostnames in email instead and abolish the wildcard MX. The reason I mention this is that the fundamental thing is the same-- you're trying to solve a problem that shouldn't exist. The whole point of DNS is to tell you the address for valid servers. If you return an address for any hostname in your domain, then people who have mis-typed a hostname will then have to wait for their data (HTTP, SMTP, telnet, whatever) connection to time out, rather than coming back immediately and telling them the hostname is wrong. Mind you, I can see some applications for this, but the majority of the advantages are spurious at best. And since the only place you should be advertising an RFC 1918 address like 192.168.1.1 is on your internal network, all you're going to do is annoy your users. Cheers, Tony -- Tony Landells Senior Network Engineer Ph: +61 3 9677 9319 Australian Clearing Services Pty Ltd Fax: +61 3 9677 9355 Level 4, Rialto North Tower 525 Collins Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message