[Gllug] CNAME confusion

[Dylan]

On Saturday 03 Apr 2004 12:01 pm, Ben Fitzgerald wrote:
> Hi
>
> I need a little DNS help from the group. I know
> it's not linux specific, so sorry, but please
> help me out!
>
> I have a domain that is owned at pipex, let's
> call it mydomain.com. I have some webspace
> at zen, it's to be found, for example, at
> www.zen12345.zen.co.uk. mydomain.com also
> has a CNAME record managed by pipex, www.mydomain.com.
>
> I thought that if I updated my CNAME record
> through pipex that I could point www.mydomain.com
> to www.zen12345.zen.co.uk. and that when I then
> browsed to www.mydomain.com my browser would
> query dns, pick up the CNAME and then resolve
> it to the real ip and I'd see the same page
> I see when I browse directly to www.zen12345.zen.co.uk
>
> currently dig outputs (snipped) as below:
>
> ;; QUESTION SECTION:
> ;www.mydomain.com.                        IN      A
>
> ;; ANSWER SECTION:
> www.mydomain.com.  20074 IN CNAME www.zen12345.zen.co.uk.
> www.zen12345.zen.co.uk. 63342 IN A  212.23.8.80
>
> It seems I've got this all wrong as when I do browse
> to www.mydomain.com it doesn't work at all!
>
> Can any DNS gurus (or intermediate are even better than
> me!) show me the light?

Well, I'm not a dns guru, but I think you should consider this:

Zen's web server will have many many domains hosted, so the IP in the 
answer section is NOT exclusive to you. When 212.23.8.80 gets a HTTP 
connection from you browser looking for www.mydomain.com it will check 
to see if it's a domain it knows about. It doesn't - because the domain 
is hosted by Pipex, so the connection is either rejected or returns an 
error.

Upshot - I don't think you can do it this way. What you need is web site 
redirection. Pipex may provide this as a service, or you might have to 
set it up for yourself on the Pipex webspace associated with 
www.mydomain.com

HTH

Dylan

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