Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 22:27:31 +0000 From: Bart Smit <bit@signature.nl> To: Ronald Wiplinger <ronald@linkou.trace.com.tw> Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Name Server Q Message-ID: <1.5.4.16.19961122222731.215f3afa@pollux.or.signature.nl>
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At 08:36 AM 11/22/96 +0800, Ronald Wiplinger wrote: > >On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, James Buszard-Welcher wrote: > >> Um... CNAME means "Cannonical Name". Which is to say >> that 'news' is an alias for a machine that is really >> called 'somename'. There is only ONE cannonical name >> for a given IP address. > > >That is not true! You can have multiple CNAME to one IP, but can only have >one IP to lookup one name. Only the named.rev is limited, not the >named.hosts. > oops... There is a rather persistent misconception about CNAME records that I see and hear all too often. Let me try to explain: A CNAME record allows you to look up the canonical name for an alias host name. So, in the example above 'news' is the alias, and 'somename' is the canonical name. Many people I know think & talk about 'news' BEING the canonical name but that's not correct. After all, we also don't call 'somename' an IP address just because it's in the first field of an A (address) record, do we? Of course you can have multiple CNAME records all pointing to the same canonical name, but there's only one canonical name for each IP. -- Bart
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