Lazy DNS (answer)

This is the answer to Lazy DNS

I told him to do this:

That is, simply add a "." after "xyz.com". If you have ever edited DNS files manually, you know why I smiled and why I titled this "Lazy DNS": at the text file level, if you leave off the period from a definition like this, the assumption is that the base domain name needs to be tacked on. So this DNS tool is "lazy" : it expects the MX records to be formatted exactly as they need to be put in the raw file. Any halfway decent programmer would have done minimal checking and reformatting to easily avoid this error by the user, but that checking does not exist here.

This of course fixed the problem after the records propagated:

$ dig +short xyz.com mx
10 mail.xyz.com.
20 mail2.xyz.com.

3 comments

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Wed Oct 3 15:26:28 2007:   BigDumbDinosaur


Forgetting that trailing period is actually fairly common. I have fixed a number of DNS problems over the years because of that seemingly trivial oversight. <Grin>



Wed Oct 3 15:36:03 2007:   TonyLawrence


I'm sure almost all of us have made that mistake - but it shouldn't happen with a GUI tool.





Thu Oct 4 14:19:23 2007:   BigDumbDinosaur


Ya won't get any argument from me on that score.

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