On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 03:20:07AM -0600, Jimmy Hess wrote:
The 32 bits will be interpreted as the bits of an IPv4 address, which are always 4 numeric values (0 to 255) separated by dots.
Well, that's how they're listed in master files, anyway; that's the only constraint RFC 1035 makes (see section 3.4.1). If you're outputting them for human consumption, you could of course output them in some other format. That might be surprising to some. (It's sure not what dig does.) I have heard claims that some hosts on the Internet did use other representations of v4 addresses for human consumption. I have never observed this. Certainly, the wire format is not dotted-quad, of course. (None of this is to disagree that anything other than a 32 bit Internet address would be ill-formed RDATA for an A record.) A -- Andrew Sullivan Dyn, Inc. asullivan@dyn.com v: +1 603 663 0448