3 ms·
IIUC, WKS was basically just a list of ports you could expect to be open on a host, while SRV allows you to indicate a separate server to handle a given service
by Crespyl 10y ago
IIUC, WKS was basically just a list of ports you could expect to be open on a host, while SRV allows you to indicate a separate server to handle a given service.
Wikipedia[0] has the example of a SIP telephony server, `example.com` sets a SRV record that redirects interested clients to `sipserver.example.com`.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
- mjn 10y agoYeah, there's no pointing to other hosts in WKS, just information on the host itself. I believe it come out of ideas about service discovery in the early days of the internet, when you might know of 100 other hosts, but not know which ones ran SMTP, FTP, etc. The WKS records would let you get a map of the net's services by doing a bunch of DNS lookups instead of having to portscan everyone. SRV records are more like an MX record generalized to arbitrary services, allowing a domain to point to the hosts that provides various services for that domain.