Recommendations for DNS

Just a couple of comments...

Hans Niklasson wrote:
> SOA      The address in this field must be a valid e-mail address to the
>          administrator for the DNS.

It must _correspond_ to a valid email address (by replacing the first '.' with
an '@') but isn't an email address itself -- I've seen some broken zone files
where there was an '@' in the SOA record.

>         *** It's also good practise to have role address instead of
> 		personal, ie root.. admin.. hostmaster.. 
> 		(when domain-administrator is leaving your company, you 
> 		only change the alias for role address).
>  
> Ex:
>  
> domain.xx.        3600    SOA     dns.domain.xx admin.domain.xx. 
                                                 ^
You're missing a '.' here (the dns.domain.xx.domain.xx. problem you mention
below).

>  
>  
> SERIAL   Serial number should follow this format: YYYYMMDDXX 
>          ( year.year.year.year.month.month.day.day.nr.nr ),
>          where XX is the number of the latest update of the zone in the 
>          same day. (Year 2000 is near.)
>  
> Ex:
>  
>                   1998010101      ; serial

If anyone is interested (and doesn't want to reinvent the wheel), I've got a
short perl script which generates suitable numbers and replaces a magic
token (%SERIAL%) in zone files when installing updates which I can tidy up a
bit and make available.

>  
> TTL      A good balance of this will reduce unecessary traffic between
>         nameservers.
>  
> Ex:
>  
>                   28800   ; refresh (8 hours)
>                   7200    ; retry (2 hour)
>                   604800  ; expire (7 days)
>                   86400 )  ; minimum (1 day)
>  
> MX       When pointing a domain to a mailserver/hostname, don4t forget to
>          add a glue record ( A ) for this.
>  
> Ex:
>  
> domain.xx.        86400    MX      10 mail.domain.xx.
>  
> mail.domain.xx    86400    A       192.168.0.1
                ^
Missing '.' again.

> Trailing dots: 
>         Don4t forget to add a "." at the end of the domain/
>         hostname. If this is forgotten, this will make the DNS to add the
>         domain name to the domain/hostname again. This will cause
>         resolving problems.
>  
> Ex:
>  
> domain.xx.        86400    MX      10 mail.domain.xx.domain.xx.

Regards,
James

----- ___                       - James Aldridge, Senior Network Engineer,
---- /    /   /  ___  ____ _/_ -- EUnet Communications Services BV
--- /--- /   / /   / /___/ /  --- Singel 540, 1017 AZ Amsterdam, NL
-- /___ /___/ /   / /___  /_ ---- Tel: +31 20 530 5327; Fax: +31 20 622 4657
-                           ----- 24hr emergency number: +31 20 421 0865