Use of DNS Aliases for Network Services
RFC 2219, “Use of DNS Aliases for Network Services”, is a Best Current Practice document published in October 1997 by M. Hamilton, R. Wright. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
It has become a common practice to use symbolic names (usually CNAMEs) in the Domain Name Service (DNS - [RFC-1034, RFC-1035]) to refer to network services such as anonymous FTP [RFC-959] servers, Gopher [RFC- 1436] servers, and most notably World-Wide Web HTTP [RFC-1945] servers. This is desirable for a number of reasons. It provides a way of moving services from one machine to another transparently, and a mechanism by which people or agents may programmatically discover that an organization runs, say, a World-Wide Web server. Although this approach has been almost universally adopted, there is no standards document or similar specification for these commonly used names. This document seeks to rectify this situation by gathering together the extant 'folklore' on naming conventions, and proposes a mechanism for accommodating new protocols. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
The canonical text of RFC 2219 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
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