2 ms·
Unless I'm missing something, the standard sounds pretty stupid
by eznzt 6y ago
Unless I'm missing something, the standard sounds pretty stupid
- tsimionescu 6y agoYou're missing something: IPv4 is not the only type of physical address supported by DNS. There is also IPv6, and historically there were others. Instead of trying to parse the address and guess what protocol it might be, DNS tries to make that unambiguous: you ask it for the A or AAAA records for a domain name you are interested in, and you know for sure that you are getting an IPv4 or IPv6 address respectively. The only clean alternative would have been to make an MXMXMXMX record type to hold a domain name OR an IPv6 address.
- JdeBP 6y agoYou are missing a lot, including the fact mentioned several times in this discussion that the data portion of an MX resource record simply is not an IP address. The data structure is a wire-format domain name (plus an integer). Even in BIND's "zone" file format, a human-format IP address isn't a fully qualified human-format domain name. But yes, the DNS RFCs are not as good as they could have been. However, you have reached that conclusion by the wrong route. (-: