From owner-freebsd-isp Fri Nov 22 14:34:35 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA22049 for isp-outgoing; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 14:28:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from pollux.or.signature.nl (root@pollux.or.signature.nl [194.229.138.194]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA22041 for ; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 14:28:13 -0800 (PST) Received: from pc03.or.signature.nl (pc03.or.signature.nl [194.229.138.197]) by pollux.or.signature.nl (8.7.6/bs) with SMTP id XAA07123; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 23:27:57 +0100 (MET) Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19961122222731.215f3afa@pollux.or.signature.nl> X-Sender: bit@pollux.or.signature.nl X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (16) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 22:27:31 +0000 To: Ronald Wiplinger From: Bart Smit Subject: Re: Name Server Q Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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