4 ms·
Introducing the ALIAS Record
- justincormack 15y ago"We’re still working out some of the details of ALIAS records, but we do feel that they are a very useful addition to the records supported by DNSimple" Guys, have you heard of writing an RFC? Other people might like this too, and have contributions to the detail.
- kijeda 15y agoIt seems like this is a provisioning trick, rather than an actual DNS record. None of this "ALIAS" records ends up in a zone, or in a DNS packet; rather it is some option on a web interface that presumably never comes near the actual DNS because it is provisioned as something else. I'm curious, if you point such an ALIAS to a service that dynamically returns different IP addresses based on location; what this service is going to do.
- aeden 15y agoRight now it would resolve to the location of whichever of our name servers handled the request. Theoretically we could pass through the original requestor's IP address, but we don't right now.
- bgentry 15y agoSeems like that would make caching the results substantially harder on your side. So, a small limitation is that this shouldn't be used in front of a geo dns. Fortunately, it's still a great choice for the other 99% of sites.
- robinhowlett 15y agoThis seems very similar to the Amazon Route 53 Alias record which I've found quite useful for pointing to ELB instances: http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#Supported_DNS_record_types http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#Supported_DNS_record_typ...
- aeden 15y agoThe Amazon Alias record provided both the inspiration and the name. :-)
- thwarted 15y agoCNAMEs wont work for their use case, but it seems like DNAMEs might. However DNAMEs work at the (sub)domain level to alias a series of records, not just one.
- aeden 15y agoWe considered DNAME records, however a DNAME only redirects subdomains: Unlike a CNAME RR, a DNAME RR redirects DNS names subordinate to its owner name; the owner name of a DNAME is not redirected itself. Thus for this to work for a second-level domain the redirection would have to occur at the top-level domain. In essence the behavior is not what is needed for this particular problem.
- decklin 15y agoThey should refer to this as a feature of their platform, not a record type.
- Maven911 15y agoDont PTR records already have this functionality
- aeden 15y agoA domain could indeed have multiple PTR records and they can exist with other records for a name, however for PTR records to be used for the purpose of aliasing there would need to be some sort of additional processing in resolvers. If I were to write an RFC then PTR records might be a good place to start. Alternatively I think NAPTR records could be used as well.