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One of the "Open Books" on http://www.zytrax.com/ covers DNS and has been used as a base for a book, it seems to be pretty comprehensive: http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/. It also contains a section about record types. -- C167 ( talk) 18:36, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
The SpamCopWiki holds a copy of the section of the Wikipedia DNS article that this article was based on. -- Alvestrand 08:34, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
As people can see from my recent updates, I've added/updated quite a few of the DNS record types, but I haven't touched several important classes, in particular the DNSSEC and IPSec records. Honestly, I do know know the state of either of these well enough to know which ones are current, which ones are obsolete, and which ones are irrelevant.
Should these record types be added? If so, does anyone know which ones?
I have also not added the type99 SPF record type as I was involved in that project. Wrs1864 ( talk) 18:55, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
There are a large number of DNS records that are either obsolete (MD/MF/MB/MG/WKS/X25/etc.) or have never really been used much (HINFO/GPOS/SINK/APL/etc.) which I have not included. I'm not sure if they should be mentioned in a small summary section, similar to how WKS is currently mentioned, or not mentioned at all, or if they should be put into the main table, maybe with a new column denoting obsolete/experimental/standard/whatever.
I am personally leaning toward the summary paragraph format but I am very interested in what other people think. Wrs1864 ( talk) 19:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Both 217.184.142.38 and User:Dogcow have expressed doubts about whether some records should be labeled as dead, and I think they have a point. I'm sure that every single defined RR type is published *somewhere* on the internet, and there might even be a few things checking them, so technically, they are "in use". I changed the wording to say "not in use by any notable application", and if any of those records are used by notable applications, a wikipedia article can be written. However, that kind of points to whether some of the records in the main list are really notable, in particular things like CERT, DHCID, DLV, SSHFP, and TA seem least likely to be in any significant use to me. DNAME was once used to redirect 2001.ip6.int to 2001.ip6.arpa and even RFC 3364 which downgrades A6/bit-labels notes that DNAME usage has been proposed for things other than IPv6, but I don't know if it really is being used. The SSHFP option isn't even mentioned in the SSH article and the TA record doesn't even have an RFC defined for it.
I guess one of my concerns is that we appear to be violating the WP:No original research and WP:NOTCRYSTAL guidelines by using our knowledge of DNS usage to decide what is worth getting a main list entry, and what gets shoved into the "obsolete" bucket. It isn't hard to find people who feel that IPSec, IPv6, and DNSSEC are all pipedreams (can you say DJB?) and therefore all of those records shouldn't be in the main list. On the other hand, I don't think we should throw every DNS record into the main list, that would just add clutter. Wrs1864 ( talk) 19:55, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
6.1.3.6 Status of RR Types
Name servers MUST be able to load all RR types except MD and
MF from configuration files. The MD and MF types are
obsolete and MUST NOT be implemented; in particular, name
servers MUST NOT load these types from configuration files.
DISCUSSION:
The RR types MB, MG, MR, NULL, MINFO and RP are
considered experimental, and applications that use the
DNS cannot expect these RR types to be supported by
most domains. Furthermore these types are subject to
redefinition.
The TXT and WKS RR types have not been widely used by
Internet sites; as a result, an application cannot rely
on the the existence of a TXT or WKS RR in most
domains.
RP appears twice: "Not used by notable applications" and as the last item, describes its use "may be used for certain human-readable..."
Do humans count as 'notable applications'? I've run into registrars/zone operators who require RP records. Here's one: http://nic.southborough.ma.us/
I agree that RP records aren't as common as they might be. The web as a source of contact info and spam operators that harvest any source of email addresses have certainly contributed to their downturn in popularity. But I've still seen more RP records than LOC records.
In any case, the article should be consistent.
Also, the reference to the SINK record: I'm not sure it ever was intended to float. It does have an RR assignment (40) per
http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-2 But if one reads the internet draft, it seems like an April Fools RFC (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Comments). The last version even has an April date -- though there were several drafts. At most, it seems more designed to make a point about the abuse of TXT records and the DNS as a universal database than as a serious proposal for a record type. I could be wrong.
Eastlake (the author) is still around - it might be worth contacting him to determine his actual intent. (That's not original research, which the entire list borders on, but a suggestion to approach a primary source.) Rather than publish an e-mail address here, I'll point out that he is listed on linked-in at https://www.linkedin.com/in/eastlake
Rectapedia ( talk) 11:50, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
Two notes:
1) The RP record type is listed both in the main (actively used?) types and in the obsolete types. Either it is obsolete or it is in use - NOT both.
2) There was a lot of opposition to the deprecation of the SPF RRtype and disagreement with RFC 7208. If it is to be considered obsolete, this disagreement should be noted as it does still find some use.
2001:470:D:468:7455:7A:1C17:3DB4 (
talk) 21:47, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
This list seems to be close to 100% original research, and most of it is wrong and/or very misleading. For example, NULL records are clearly not obsoleted in RFC 1035 and clearly are in use (e.g. in iodine, for the intended purpose). It seems most of the records in this section have not been obsoleted in any normal sense of the word, and there are usually no references to back it up, either - this is clearly made up misinformation. 85.216.38.80 ( talk) 20:32, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
Is the AFSDB record used by only OpenAFS, or by all Andrew File System implementations? We should probably link to the main article if all of them use it. Wrs1864 ( talk) 12:43, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
This article ought to have a link so some online tool that allows you to view all the DNS records registered for any given name. This is a tool I have been looking for in the past and would find quite useful. If anyone knows of such a tool, please add it. 158.104.1.114 ( talk) 03:02, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
"separate than that used in the SOA record" - this is plain English? Maybe "separated from ..." would mean something. -- Doru001 ( talk) 09:55, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
I have an idea about a feature that would change how the internet worked.
I propose that DNS have resource record types such as: porthttp,porthttps,portsmtp,portsmtps,portimap,portimaps,portpop3,portpop3s,portftp,portftps,etc...
I appears to me that such a move would change the way the world relies on IP addresses, since we appear to be running out. If you think how many servers there are in the world that have static IP addresses that only host one web page or even one service.
It seems like it would be fairly easy to implement a record type lookup to determine what port a website is using. The same thing could be accomplished for looking up what port a mail server is using. Yes the web browsers of the world could be adapted to do a ip and port lookup.
SSL Certificates could be adapted to include both the domain name and port.
DNS record types could be created and used to register what port a webpage is on.
For example: My webpage would have two DNS records. Record Type "A" host record, www.example.com = 127.0.0.1 Record Type "porthttp" port record, www.example.com = 80
This type of resource lookup would allow the internet to host a website or service on which ever port they wanted and would prevent the world from relying on common ports as the answer of where am I going to put my service.
Think about this. Currently one static IP address can only host one website service on a single static IP address. Routing and NAT take care of this. The only problem is there is no DNS record to lookup a port for the expected service. If a single IP address can have 65535 ports then a single IP NAT address could host 65535 websites on 65535 different ports. All is need is the ability to find the port that the http service is located on. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.106.179.249 ( talk) 10:58, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
I also see this as a chance to solve the world's problem with ISP's blocking commonly used ports.
I don't have the programming skills to do the work, but if the idea was communicated to the world, the right people could make it happen.
09:55, 28 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.106.179.249 ( talk)
Is this the place for this suggestion? Would be more helpful to send this up to the consortium that governs DNS...
Nekksys (
talk) 19:32, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
The description of DNAME:
"DNAME creates an alias for a name and all its subnames"
seems to contradict the explanation given in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record#DNAME_record :
"An A record lookup for foo.example.com will fail because a DNAME is not a CNAME. However, a look up for xyzzy.foo.example.com will be DNAME mapped and return the A record..."
If these two statements are contradictory, one of them should obviously be corrected. If they are not contradictory, they need to be clarified. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.251.178.207 ( talk) 14:28, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
cnames = really? i have no clue of what that does or what that's supposed to mean. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.135.156.3 ( talk) 05:49, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Missing CSYNC - RFC7477, record type 62, "Advises parent zone operator to update NS and Glue records"
Rectapedia ( talk) 13:23, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
I started editing the table section to add a call to the anchor template in order to be able to link to a specific RR (happens to have been "PTR"), and instead found a lot of div tags with id attributes. I suppose this serves the same purpose, the ability to (wiki)link to a document fragment with "#" in the URI. What would be the implications to changing these from div tags to calls to anchor? Is this the sort of thing which should be done?
DNAME is not obsolete. It is not uncommon to use it in mergers and acquisitions.
RFC 2672, which the table claims obsoletes DNAME, does not. It clarifies its use and illuminates some operational pitfalls.
What may have confused folks is that one of its uses was incorrectly deprecated by RFC3363, which deprecation is reversed in 2672. On page 12 of RFC 6672, which is current:
In [RFC3363], the following paragraph is updated by this document, and the use of DNAME RRs in the reverse tree is no longer deprecated.
Note that this is the only use that was questioned. DNAME per-se was never deprecated or obsoleted.
The 2008 musings about "to my knowledge was never deployed" are not authoritative, and the extent that they may have been true at the time, certainly do not reflect current reality.
Please read 6672 carefully and correct this article.
A full list record type assignments and their official status is available at http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4
Except as officially obsoleted or deprecated in an RFC, the use of "Obsolete" is inappropriate in this article.
If you can cite a reliable source for frequency of use, you could reasonably have an "infrequently used" section - assuming there's a reasonable threshold.
Considering the number of records currently in the DNS, a very small percentage can easily represent a large number of records.
Rectapedia (
talk) 18:59, 15 December 2016 (UTC)
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Regarding the RP resource record... the data there are simply described as "Human Readable", but are actually pointers to another record (probably one or more TXT records) that contain the free-form text. Sort of like the MX record refers to another domain name A record.
Likewise, the other field is intended to contain an email address, encoded in the same fashion as the email address in the SOA record. [1]
Louis Mamakos ( talk) 20:38, 31 July 2019 (UTC) Louis Mamakos <louie@transsys.com>
References
This article is rated List-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
One of the "Open Books" on http://www.zytrax.com/ covers DNS and has been used as a base for a book, it seems to be pretty comprehensive: http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/. It also contains a section about record types. -- C167 ( talk) 18:36, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
The SpamCopWiki holds a copy of the section of the Wikipedia DNS article that this article was based on. -- Alvestrand 08:34, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
As people can see from my recent updates, I've added/updated quite a few of the DNS record types, but I haven't touched several important classes, in particular the DNSSEC and IPSec records. Honestly, I do know know the state of either of these well enough to know which ones are current, which ones are obsolete, and which ones are irrelevant.
Should these record types be added? If so, does anyone know which ones?
I have also not added the type99 SPF record type as I was involved in that project. Wrs1864 ( talk) 18:55, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
There are a large number of DNS records that are either obsolete (MD/MF/MB/MG/WKS/X25/etc.) or have never really been used much (HINFO/GPOS/SINK/APL/etc.) which I have not included. I'm not sure if they should be mentioned in a small summary section, similar to how WKS is currently mentioned, or not mentioned at all, or if they should be put into the main table, maybe with a new column denoting obsolete/experimental/standard/whatever.
I am personally leaning toward the summary paragraph format but I am very interested in what other people think. Wrs1864 ( talk) 19:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Both 217.184.142.38 and User:Dogcow have expressed doubts about whether some records should be labeled as dead, and I think they have a point. I'm sure that every single defined RR type is published *somewhere* on the internet, and there might even be a few things checking them, so technically, they are "in use". I changed the wording to say "not in use by any notable application", and if any of those records are used by notable applications, a wikipedia article can be written. However, that kind of points to whether some of the records in the main list are really notable, in particular things like CERT, DHCID, DLV, SSHFP, and TA seem least likely to be in any significant use to me. DNAME was once used to redirect 2001.ip6.int to 2001.ip6.arpa and even RFC 3364 which downgrades A6/bit-labels notes that DNAME usage has been proposed for things other than IPv6, but I don't know if it really is being used. The SSHFP option isn't even mentioned in the SSH article and the TA record doesn't even have an RFC defined for it.
I guess one of my concerns is that we appear to be violating the WP:No original research and WP:NOTCRYSTAL guidelines by using our knowledge of DNS usage to decide what is worth getting a main list entry, and what gets shoved into the "obsolete" bucket. It isn't hard to find people who feel that IPSec, IPv6, and DNSSEC are all pipedreams (can you say DJB?) and therefore all of those records shouldn't be in the main list. On the other hand, I don't think we should throw every DNS record into the main list, that would just add clutter. Wrs1864 ( talk) 19:55, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
6.1.3.6 Status of RR Types
Name servers MUST be able to load all RR types except MD and
MF from configuration files. The MD and MF types are
obsolete and MUST NOT be implemented; in particular, name
servers MUST NOT load these types from configuration files.
DISCUSSION:
The RR types MB, MG, MR, NULL, MINFO and RP are
considered experimental, and applications that use the
DNS cannot expect these RR types to be supported by
most domains. Furthermore these types are subject to
redefinition.
The TXT and WKS RR types have not been widely used by
Internet sites; as a result, an application cannot rely
on the the existence of a TXT or WKS RR in most
domains.
RP appears twice: "Not used by notable applications" and as the last item, describes its use "may be used for certain human-readable..."
Do humans count as 'notable applications'? I've run into registrars/zone operators who require RP records. Here's one: http://nic.southborough.ma.us/
I agree that RP records aren't as common as they might be. The web as a source of contact info and spam operators that harvest any source of email addresses have certainly contributed to their downturn in popularity. But I've still seen more RP records than LOC records.
In any case, the article should be consistent.
Also, the reference to the SINK record: I'm not sure it ever was intended to float. It does have an RR assignment (40) per
http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-2 But if one reads the internet draft, it seems like an April Fools RFC (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Comments). The last version even has an April date -- though there were several drafts. At most, it seems more designed to make a point about the abuse of TXT records and the DNS as a universal database than as a serious proposal for a record type. I could be wrong.
Eastlake (the author) is still around - it might be worth contacting him to determine his actual intent. (That's not original research, which the entire list borders on, but a suggestion to approach a primary source.) Rather than publish an e-mail address here, I'll point out that he is listed on linked-in at https://www.linkedin.com/in/eastlake
Rectapedia ( talk) 11:50, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
Two notes:
1) The RP record type is listed both in the main (actively used?) types and in the obsolete types. Either it is obsolete or it is in use - NOT both.
2) There was a lot of opposition to the deprecation of the SPF RRtype and disagreement with RFC 7208. If it is to be considered obsolete, this disagreement should be noted as it does still find some use.
2001:470:D:468:7455:7A:1C17:3DB4 (
talk) 21:47, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
This list seems to be close to 100% original research, and most of it is wrong and/or very misleading. For example, NULL records are clearly not obsoleted in RFC 1035 and clearly are in use (e.g. in iodine, for the intended purpose). It seems most of the records in this section have not been obsoleted in any normal sense of the word, and there are usually no references to back it up, either - this is clearly made up misinformation. 85.216.38.80 ( talk) 20:32, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
Is the AFSDB record used by only OpenAFS, or by all Andrew File System implementations? We should probably link to the main article if all of them use it. Wrs1864 ( talk) 12:43, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
This article ought to have a link so some online tool that allows you to view all the DNS records registered for any given name. This is a tool I have been looking for in the past and would find quite useful. If anyone knows of such a tool, please add it. 158.104.1.114 ( talk) 03:02, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
"separate than that used in the SOA record" - this is plain English? Maybe "separated from ..." would mean something. -- Doru001 ( talk) 09:55, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
I have an idea about a feature that would change how the internet worked.
I propose that DNS have resource record types such as: porthttp,porthttps,portsmtp,portsmtps,portimap,portimaps,portpop3,portpop3s,portftp,portftps,etc...
I appears to me that such a move would change the way the world relies on IP addresses, since we appear to be running out. If you think how many servers there are in the world that have static IP addresses that only host one web page or even one service.
It seems like it would be fairly easy to implement a record type lookup to determine what port a website is using. The same thing could be accomplished for looking up what port a mail server is using. Yes the web browsers of the world could be adapted to do a ip and port lookup.
SSL Certificates could be adapted to include both the domain name and port.
DNS record types could be created and used to register what port a webpage is on.
For example: My webpage would have two DNS records. Record Type "A" host record, www.example.com = 127.0.0.1 Record Type "porthttp" port record, www.example.com = 80
This type of resource lookup would allow the internet to host a website or service on which ever port they wanted and would prevent the world from relying on common ports as the answer of where am I going to put my service.
Think about this. Currently one static IP address can only host one website service on a single static IP address. Routing and NAT take care of this. The only problem is there is no DNS record to lookup a port for the expected service. If a single IP address can have 65535 ports then a single IP NAT address could host 65535 websites on 65535 different ports. All is need is the ability to find the port that the http service is located on. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.106.179.249 ( talk) 10:58, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
I also see this as a chance to solve the world's problem with ISP's blocking commonly used ports.
I don't have the programming skills to do the work, but if the idea was communicated to the world, the right people could make it happen.
09:55, 28 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.106.179.249 ( talk)
Is this the place for this suggestion? Would be more helpful to send this up to the consortium that governs DNS...
Nekksys (
talk) 19:32, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
The description of DNAME:
"DNAME creates an alias for a name and all its subnames"
seems to contradict the explanation given in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record#DNAME_record :
"An A record lookup for foo.example.com will fail because a DNAME is not a CNAME. However, a look up for xyzzy.foo.example.com will be DNAME mapped and return the A record..."
If these two statements are contradictory, one of them should obviously be corrected. If they are not contradictory, they need to be clarified. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.251.178.207 ( talk) 14:28, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
cnames = really? i have no clue of what that does or what that's supposed to mean. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.135.156.3 ( talk) 05:49, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Missing CSYNC - RFC7477, record type 62, "Advises parent zone operator to update NS and Glue records"
Rectapedia ( talk) 13:23, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
I started editing the table section to add a call to the anchor template in order to be able to link to a specific RR (happens to have been "PTR"), and instead found a lot of div tags with id attributes. I suppose this serves the same purpose, the ability to (wiki)link to a document fragment with "#" in the URI. What would be the implications to changing these from div tags to calls to anchor? Is this the sort of thing which should be done?
DNAME is not obsolete. It is not uncommon to use it in mergers and acquisitions.
RFC 2672, which the table claims obsoletes DNAME, does not. It clarifies its use and illuminates some operational pitfalls.
What may have confused folks is that one of its uses was incorrectly deprecated by RFC3363, which deprecation is reversed in 2672. On page 12 of RFC 6672, which is current:
In [RFC3363], the following paragraph is updated by this document, and the use of DNAME RRs in the reverse tree is no longer deprecated.
Note that this is the only use that was questioned. DNAME per-se was never deprecated or obsoleted.
The 2008 musings about "to my knowledge was never deployed" are not authoritative, and the extent that they may have been true at the time, certainly do not reflect current reality.
Please read 6672 carefully and correct this article.
A full list record type assignments and their official status is available at http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4
Except as officially obsoleted or deprecated in an RFC, the use of "Obsolete" is inappropriate in this article.
If you can cite a reliable source for frequency of use, you could reasonably have an "infrequently used" section - assuming there's a reasonable threshold.
Considering the number of records currently in the DNS, a very small percentage can easily represent a large number of records.
Rectapedia (
talk) 18:59, 15 December 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on List of DNS record types. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 18 January 2022).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 01:37, 25 December 2017 (UTC)
Regarding the RP resource record... the data there are simply described as "Human Readable", but are actually pointers to another record (probably one or more TXT records) that contain the free-form text. Sort of like the MX record refers to another domain name A record.
Likewise, the other field is intended to contain an email address, encoded in the same fashion as the email address in the SOA record. [1]
Louis Mamakos ( talk) 20:38, 31 July 2019 (UTC) Louis Mamakos <louie@transsys.com>
References