At 12:11 PM -0700 11/1/01, Leonard Spell  imposed structure on a 
stream of electrons, yielding:

>Then it begs the question - why in heaven's name would you use CNAME?

The CNAME has in fact been so overused that some people who know a 
lot about DNS think it should be formally deprecated or even banned 
from use except for its rather arcane use in CIDR reverse delegations 
(where it is the only solution.)

It stands for "Canonical Name" and is supposed to be a means of 
providing the correct name in place of a name that may be obsolete, 
constructed by guess, or even a common typo. It's a way for DNS to 
say "don't use that name, use THIS name instead" and was never 
supposed to be an 'alias' mechanism. Were there such an alias 
mechanism, it would significantly complicate the coding of complete 
resolvers, since such software would have to be prepared for many 
layers of alias, and look out for alias loops. ALL DNS record types 
whicvh have a name as their right hand side are formally restricted 
to names which have A records in DNS to avoid that potential problem.


-- 
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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