From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Oct 25 18:16:51 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E67DE1065679 for ; Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:16:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Received: from fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org (blue.qeng-ho.org [217.155.128.241]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6E4B88FC18 for ; Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:16:51 +0000 (UTC) Received: from fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id n9PIGnnA008852; Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:16:50 GMT (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Message-ID: <4AE49611.4030008@qeng-ho.org> Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:16:49 +0000 From: Arthur Chance User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090830) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Sean Cavanaugh References: <200910231717.AA243925902@mail.Go2France.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" Subject: Re: FW: DNS Question X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:16:52 -0000 Sean Cavanaugh wrote: > The other interesting side would be reverse DNS lookups. Only one > record would be returned, and most likely would be the original A > record. A nice example of this is doing a basic "ping -a ww.yahoo.com" > which you get back that it is resolving "www-real.wa1.b.yahoo.com". As a comment on reverse DNS lookups, although the example Sean gave should have a single PTR entry as the result of a reverse lookup, in general reverse DNS lookups can return *multiple* values. If multiple A records pointing at the same numeric address exist, the reverse lookup on that address must (if correct) return the corresponding multiple names. RFC 2181 (Clarifications to the DNS Specification), section 10.2: 10.2. PTR records Confusion about canonical names has lead to a belief that a PTR record should have exactly one RR in its RRSet. This is incorrect, the relevant section of RFC1034 (section 3.6.2) indicates that the value of a PTR record should be a canonical name. That is, it should not be an alias. There is no implication in that section that only one PTR record is permitted for a name. No such restriction should be inferred. Note that while the value of a PTR record must not be an alias, there is no requirement that the process of resolving a PTR record not encounter any aliases. The label that is being looked up for a PTR value might have a CNAME record. That is, it might be an alias. The value of that CNAME RR, if not another alias, which it should not be, will give the location where the PTR record is found. That record gives the result of the PTR type lookup. This final result, the value of the PTR RR, is the label which must not be an alias. OK, there's a couple of big questions, which is how many DNS configs actually obey this and how much application code allows for it, but that's the spec.