Wildcard DNS Support Enabled by DEFAULT

[True Magic]

IT makes sense that Wildcard DNS (* IN A) records should automatically be added for every domain -- who would be disadvantaged by accepting traffic to sub-domain off the main domain?

-Merlin

 

[nobaloney]

It might work very well for you.

It would make DirectAdmin's DNS management system totally unusable for me, and if I couldn't turn it off I'd have to abandon DA.

What's wrong with making it an option so you can use it but I don't have to?

Jeff

 

[True Magic]

Please explain yourself in how this would make it unusable for you.

-Merlin

It might work very well for you.

It would make DirectAdmin's DNS management system totally unusable for me, and if I couldn't turn it off I'd have to abandon DA.

What's wrong with making it an option so you can use it but I don't have to?

Jeff

 

[nobaloney]

Please explain yourself in how this would make it unusable for you.

Well, since you said "please" .

1) I'm one of those purists that see wildcards as a workaround before there were tools for saying what you really wanted.

2) Wildcards allow return of invalid data; for example if someone tries to resolve jeff.nobaloney.net and there's no such domain. That just creates more confusion in the case of name-based sites, which then won't resolve, and in the case of IP-based sites (not as serious) which will resolve to the main site of the domain even though they shouldn't.

3) Wildcards won't work for "www.sub.example.com" so expected Internet behavior (the use of www in front of a site name) will fail.

4) Wildcards will immediately cause confusion, dissatisfaction, and customer support issues when they once work but then fail, for this reason, quoted from the "DNS and Bind" book published by O'Reilly:

<snip>
What are the limitations of wildcards? Wildcards do not match names for which there is already data.
</snip>

What that means is if, for example, there's a wildcard record for *.example.com pointing to example.com, and alpha.example.com, beta.example.com, and delta.example.com all work...

And then the administrator of beta.example.com decides to accept email on his own email server, and you add an MX record for beta.example.com pointing to someother.net...

Then all requests to beta.example.com will cease to work.

And this causes lots of confusion.

Craig Hunt, in his well known book "Linux DNS Server Administration", published by Sybex, sums it up well when he says:

<snip>
Wildcards are one of those things that sound better in theory than they are in practice.
</snip>

Jeff

 

[True Magic]

Jeff -- well said... point taken.
(good references, btw)

Okay, could there be a wild card dns check box that can insert/remove the * IN A line from the domain.db file?

-Merlin