On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 05:16:00PM -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> 
> It doesn't appear that from a functional point of view it should matter that
> an MX record uses a number rather than a name, although I may not understand

Yes, it does.  Because MX's point to hostnames, you are supposed to take
the value of the MX record, and use it to query for A records.  Hostnames
and IP addresses are stored differently, in DNS.  Hostnames are stored as,
essentially, text strings, while IP addresses are stored as, obviously,
32-bit words.  So, the result of the MX record is then resolved as a query
for A record.  Now, obviously there will not be a host named, say,
"192.168.128.3" on the Internet; in fact, "3" is obviously not a valid
top-level domain.

This particular code fragment heuristicaly recognizes hostnames that look
like IP addresses, and doesn't even bother with an A lookup, rejecting the
MX record as invalid, and with a pointer to the relevant record.

> Any insight would be appreciated.  I have a customer who is unhappy because
> one of his his correspondants can't reach him and the ISP with misconfigured
> DNS is both unresponsive and probably the only ISP available for many people
> in the community in which it's located.

Accomodating incompetence only breeds more incompetence.  That's not a good
thing.


-- 
Sam


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