[Gllug] Hosting my own domain(s)

[Ian Northeast]

Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 10:46 +0100, John Edwards wrote:
> 
> 
>>That should be RFC 2142, of course.
> 
> 
> To my knowledge there's no RFC mandating the presence of MX records for
> a domain.  If there are no MX records then RFC2142 is moot.

I don't believe there is any such requirement, nor for the domain top A 
record to point to a mail exchange. I dislike the behaviour of dropping 
down to the domain A record in the absence of MXs, I think mail should 
use MXs then give up, but that's just MHO.

Our company - not an ISP - has a large number of domains due to the 
policy of our Corporate Communications department who seem to want just 
about everything they can think of which looks remotely like our name in 
.com, .org, .net, .info, .biz, .co.uk and .nl (we are an Anglo-Dutch 
company - I managed to dissuade them from demanding the names in every 
single country specific TLD which would have been unmanageable - I'd be 
managing thousands of domains and DNS is only a small part of my job - I 
told them they'd have to hire 2 more people:). They don't want to use 
most of them, they just don't want anyone else to have them. I have a 
policy that if we own a domain it should work[1], and that anyone typing 
it into a web browser should get our official web site.

So most of these contain, apart from the mandatory SOA and NSs, only a 
domain top A record and a "www" both pointing at a little Apache virtual 
host which just does a client side redirect onto our published name in 
.com. The published name does have MX records in .co.uk and .nl pointing 
at our normal mail exchanges. These accept such mail for the standard 
postmaster, hostmaster etc. and forward to the .com equivalents but 
reject everything else with a "5xx - did you mean @<name>.com?" I put 
this in because someone who was used to UK companies being in .co.uk 
tried to email me at @<name>.co.uk and I figured he wouldn't be the only 
one. The rest don't have MX records and the web server does not of 
course accept mail, it's not allowed by the firewall anyway.

I consider this to be perfectly good behaviour. Does anyone disagree?

[1] The .nl registry has a policy of testing this. To host a .nl you 
have to permit zone transfers to a very small range of addresses 
specified by them, a /27 IIRC, so that they can vet your domains for 
correctness. I don't know of any other registry which does this (but I 
don't manage any .des:)

Regards, Ian




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