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From: marka@dmssyd.syd.dms.CSIRO.AU (Mark Andrews)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: rerouting to an absolute address
Message-ID: <7973@natmlab.dap.csiro.au>
Date: 8 Aug 90 07:25:24 GMT
References: <1990Aug6.230109.4220@ibmpa> <1990Aug7.081953.6108@terminator.cc.umich.edu> <1990Aug7.134658.23389@Octopus.COM>
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Organization: CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics
Lines: 54

In article <1990Aug7.134658.23389@Octopus.COM> pete@octopus.COM (Pete Holzmann) writes:
>Maybe I'm totally misinformed about this, but something seems to be wrong
>with this situation.
>
>I always thought that turning foo.com into an officially registered domain
>meant that it is up to foo.com to define what anything.else.foo.com means,
>including whether or not it is a valid address.

	You have to register subdomains even if it's just by using a
	wildcard record.

>If foo.com is not directly connected to the Internet, then it cannot answer
>any queries regarding anything.else.foo.com. peter, are you saying that
>this is a vvvvv wrong use of domains?

>If so, what in the world am I supposed to do? Go bug my nameserver every
>time I add a subdomain? That sounds like a pain in the neck, for me and
>for them! They didn't sign up for a hassle like that.

	No. You setup a wildcard MX record.

	i.e.

	$ORIGIN	foo.com
	*	IN	MX 	0 mx.machine.

	This will match any.thing.foo.com if you want to have mail to
	foo.com go through as well it should look like.


	$ORIGIN	com
	foo	IN	MX	0 mx.machine.
	$ORIGIN	foo.com
	*	IN	MX 	0 mx.machine.

	and if you don't want the mail for all machines to go to
	mx.machine. you have records that look like.

	$ORIGIN	com
	foo	IN	MX	0 mx.machine.
	$ORIGIN	foo.com
	amachine	IN MX	0 another.machine.
	*	IN	MX 	0 mx.machine.

	In this case mail to amachine.foo.com will be sent to
	another.machine. Mail to any other machine in foo.com will be
	sent to mx.machine.

	Just about all of ACSnet is covered by two wildcard MX records,
	they point at munnari.oz.au and uunet.uu.net (in order of
	preference). Thats 299 hosts directly under oz.au according to
	my state tables.
	
	Mark.