[ILUG] Is it me or is it BIND?

[Lance Dryden]

Lisa Muir wrote:
> If I am virtually hosting a domain eg, lisa.com and am setting it up
> in DNS, and pointing it to an existing webhost which will treat the
> domain as a local virtual server.... i set up as follows:
> 
> www     CNAME     www.webhost.com.
> 
> which works fine for www.lisa.com but for the actual domain name, if I do:
> 
> lisa.com.     CNAME     www.webhost.com.
> 
> I can't get BIND to load the zone file, and I have to change it to an A record
> 
> lisa.com.     A     <ip address of www.webhost.com>

I'm guessing "lisa.com" is the root of the DNS zone.  As someone else 
explained, CNAMEs are supposed not to coexist with anything else.

Since a DNS zone is required to include an "SOA" and at least one "NS", 
this won't work.

Just set an A record for "lisa.com."

In fact, do yourself a favor and set an A record for "www" as well. 
It's just personal taste on my part, but I don't find it reasonable to 
enforce a 2nd lookup just to make it really, really clear that one name 
is supposed to be looked up with another name.  Which is what happens 
even if "lisa.com" could be CNAMEd; you'd force a client to make another 
request to find out the stuff it wanted off of the CNAME target when you 
could just have provided the A record in the first request and been done.

   Yours, &c
   Lance Dryden