Hi Y'all Nanogites, We are changing over to PowerDNS from djbdns (tinydns) and I'm taking this opportunity to fix as much of our zone data as we can. Under tinydns things work fine despite these errors because tinydns lets you get away with stuff like this and still responds even though a zone might technically be broken because of it. The problem is that we have some zones that have records with the same hostname that have both a CNAME as well as an A record, MX record, SOA record and/or NS record. Is there an easy answer for what should be removed? I'm inclined to say that the CNAME should be removed in all these cases but I can't find any definitive information on this and after doing some tests it doesn't always seem straightforward. I've been reading various sites and information including RFC 1034 but it's difficult to decide what to do when it's already an issue. For example in RFC 1034 section 3.6.2 the use of CNAME's with NS and MX records is not permitted but other research shows this is widely used even though its technically invalid. IMHO it should have never happened in the first place (where an A record already exists a CNAME should not have been allowed to get added for example) but what can be done now that it's already an issue? In the case of the A,NS,MX,SOA and CNAME duplicates an example of how our old/current name server's responses are: (*note: not all of this is real data, customer zones have been obfuscated)* * * # dig @ns1.superb.net +nocmd mail.customerzone.com A +noques +answer ;; ANSWER SECTION: mail.customerzone.com. 14342 IN CNAME mail.superb.net. mail.customerzone.com. 86342 IN A xx.xx.246.9 # dig @ns1.superb.net +nocmd superbcolo.biz NS +noques +answer ;; ANSWER SECTION: superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN NS ns1.superb.net. superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN NS ns2.superb.net. superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN NS ns3.superb.net. superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN CNAME superbenterprise.net. # dig @ns1.superb.net +nocmd superbcolo.biz mx +noques +answer ;; ANSWER SECTION: superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN MX 10 superbcolo.biz. superbcolo.biz. 86400 IN CNAME superbenterprise.net. dig @ns1.superb.net +nocmd customerzone2.com SOA +noques +answer ;; ANSWER SECTION: customerzone2.com. 86400 IN CNAME superbenterprise.net. customerzone2.com. 86400 IN SOA ns1.superb.net. hostmaster.superb.net. 1350501302 0 0 0 0 Should the CNAME just get nuked in all of these cases? -- Landon Stewart <LStewart@Superb.Net> Sr. Administrator Systems Engineering Superb Internet Corp - 888-354-6128 x 4199 Web hosting and more "Ahead of the Rest": http://www.superbhosting.net