From: Kai Henningsen (kaih@khms.westfalen.de)
Date: Fri Sep 24 1999 - 17:28:00 CDT
chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote on 21.09.99 in <FIEzBz.Lw0@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>:
> In <ylg109bn8k.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
> writes:
> >> 1. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) associated (by the Internet
> >> DNS service [RFC 1034]) with an A record, which SHOULD identify
> >> the actual machine prepending this path-identity. Ideally, this
> >> FQDN should also be "mailable" in the sense that it enables the
> >> construction of a valid E-mail address of the form
> >> "usenet@<FQDN>" or "news@<FQDN>" [RFC 2142] whereby the
> >> administrators of that agent may be reached.
>
> >I'd support upgrading that "ideally" to a SHOULD, but don't feel strongly
> >enough about it to argue it at length.
>
>
> Hmmm! We discussed this before. A large site that has lots of machines to
> do its actual relaying may not want to burden them all with mail software,
> nor to keep having to increase its list of MX records every time it
> installs a new one. I think we were agreed that the ability to identify
Personally (being responsible for several DNS domains), I believe this is
a non-issue. Putting in an A and a MX record is really no more work than
just putting in an A record. Especially for people who generate this stuff
from some sort of database, which large sites are quite likely to do.
A far more likely problem is machines without functuioning reverse
resolution. Which breaks tcpd-paranoia-style lookups, which just about
everyone wants to do these days.
Incidentally, I recently learned of a DNS server which allows to have a
short function to determine records to return, so they don't even need to
be in a table - which will be especially nice for creating records for
dialin pools :-)
MfG Kai