On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
MacOS and Windows can both populate the reverse zone for you as can dhcp servers. The practice of filling out the reverse zone with fake PTR record [...]
OK.. let's say you're a DSL provider. Are you going to have your DHCP server populating the forward and reverse DNS? With what, the account holder's name? somename.example.com ? Wouldn't you say blahblah192-168-0-2.city.state.dsl.example.com provides more useful information? First of all, you know that the IP address is an end user, an access network's end user's one IP address, an endpoint, rather than a subnet assigned to an actual multinode network. Second of all, you know it's an ISP, and you have city and state information of the network service. This is more useful than arbitrary user made up hostname. The hostname is more meaningful on "real networks" such as SMB LANs, Enterprise intranets, web farms, server networks, and other places where generic records should not be assigned, but the PTR should be the actual hostname. If the IP address is dynamic or autoconfigured for _those_ types of networks, then yes, automatic RDNS registration makes sense. If it's static, not so much. Dynamic DNS registration is also complicated to make secure.... as in preventing hosts from updating other hosts' records or mucking around the zone in other unwanted ways requires complex key management and ACL configuration
-- Mark Andrews, ISC
-- -JH