First, there's no DNS RFC (yes, I've read them) that states that putting an A record on a domain.tld is wrong. So, you're most welcome to do so, if you so desire. However, be warned that doing so as regular practice is like swimming with piranas. You can do it, but it isn't necessarily wise.
I second Justin's experience. I've worked the ISP industry since the Arpanet days (anyone remember having to buy T1's through the local college?) and have ALWAYS practiced the policy of never resolving domain.tld. Every. It gives (l)users the freedom to be lazy with their client configuration and forces you to live with that on the serve side. Even when I only had one mail server, I always made our clients configure their MUA's with "smtp.domain.tld" for outgoing and "[pop, imap, webmail].domain.tld for incoming because eventually the system would be large enough necessitate breaking the servers apart. Even then, you'd get a few stragglers with misconfigured MUA's but it was easy to fix. Later on we build a dedicated ftp server (for security reasons) and removed FTP services from the main systems. It was nice to not break all our clients configurations. In practice, if you want to be lazy because you don't understand DNS, I'd recommend using wildcard DNS (*.domain.com) and advertising hostnames based on service. Then later, you can insert more specific records (like ftp, imap, etc) if you have to break them services apart on multiple machines. Matt On Thursday, October 10, 2002, at 09:49 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I haven't found it yet. I'm pretty sure the discussion against it was > in > O'Reilly's "TCP/IP Network Administration". I've browsed through it > in my > spare time and didn't find it. The worst problem with this is when > users > don't know you, say FTP server's address and give domain.tld a whirl. > It > might work. A few months later you might remove that record or make a > change that breaks it. You never advertised the FTP that way. You > always > advertised ftp.domain.tld so you didn't expect one of your users to be > using domain.tld. You make the change. Boom, they break. They call > you > or the helpdesk and you spend an hour or two trying to figure out why > they've been able to FTP for the past 5 months but suddenly today it > stopped working. You assume it's because of the new server you set up. > You're partially right but looking in the wrong place. :) > > I had this problem at a place I consult for. They advertised > everything > as domain.tld. When we needed to move the mail server elsewhere, we > had a > couple thousand users to contact and have change their POP/IMAP/SMTP > settings. If it had been done right the first time, we'd have saved a > few > weeks work. > > Justin > > > > On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Steve Thomas wrote: > >> | IIRC, I recall an arguement that strongly says you aren't supposed >> to put >> | an A on a domain. I forget what the main reasons were though. >> >> I'd be interested in finding out. I typically put an A record on >> 'domain.tld', then CNAME the 'www' host to it. That way, a person can >> type >> "domain.tld" or "www.domain.tld" into their browser and still reach >> the same >> site. (It's a pet peeve of mine to *have* to type in "www" to reach a >> website.) Mail almost always goes to a different server. >> >> St- >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek >> Welcome to geek heaven. >> http://thinkgeek.com/sf >> _______________________________________________ >> Spamassassin-talk mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk >> > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek > Welcome to geek heaven. > http://thinkgeek.com/sf > _______________________________________________ > Spamassassin-talk mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
