

Introducing the ALIAS Record - glenngillen
http://blog.dnsimple.com/introducing-the-alias-record/

======
justincormack
"We’re still working out some of the details of ALIAS records, but we do feel
that they are a very useful addition to the records supported by DNSimple"

Guys, have you heard of writing an RFC? Other people might like this too, and
have contributions to the detail.

~~~
kijeda
It seems like this is a provisioning trick, rather than an actual DNS record.
None of this "ALIAS" records ends up in a zone, or in a DNS packet; rather it
is some option on a web interface that presumably never comes near the actual
DNS because it is provisioned as something else.

I'm curious, if you point such an ALIAS to a service that dynamically returns
different IP addresses based on location; what this service is going to do.

~~~
aeden
Right now it would resolve to the location of whichever of our name servers
handled the request. Theoretically we could pass through the original
requestor's IP address, but we don't right now.

~~~
bgentry
Seems like that would make caching the results substantially harder on your
side.

So, a small limitation is that this shouldn't be used in front of a geo dns.
Fortunately, it's still a great choice for the other 99% of sites.

------
decklin
They should refer to this as a feature of their platform, not a record type.

------
robinhowlett
This seems very similar to the Amazon Route 53 Alias record which I've found
quite useful for pointing to ELB instances:

[http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#Supported_DNS_record_typ...](http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#Supported_DNS_record_types)

~~~
aeden
The Amazon Alias record provided both the inspiration and the name. :-)

------
thwarted
CNAMEs wont work for their use case, but it seems like DNAMEs might. However
DNAMEs work at the (sub)domain level to alias a series of records, not just
one.

~~~
aeden
We considered DNAME records, however a DNAME only redirects subdomains:

    
    
      Unlike a CNAME RR, a DNAME RR redirects DNS names subordinate to its owner name; the owner name of a DNAME is not redirected itself.
    

Thus for this to work for a second-level domain the redirection would have to
occur at the top-level domain. In essence the behavior is not what is needed
for this particular problem.

------
Maven911
Dont PTR records already have this functionality

~~~
aeden
A domain could indeed have multiple PTR records and they can exist with other
records for a name, however for PTR records to be used for the purpose of
aliasing there would need to be some sort of additional processing in
resolvers. If I were to write an RFC then PTR records might be a good place to
start. Alternatively I think NAPTR records could be used as well.

