Can I add a CNAME record and an MX record for a single domain name?

Answered Tue, 11 Jun 2002

> Hello. Great book!

Thanks!

> I have a problem with Bind 9.2.1 zone transfers failing with the error
> message "failed while receiving responses: CNAME and other data"
> The only thing that is different about this domain from others that transfer
> correctly is that it has a CNAME for a server in a different domain, which
> is on the same Nameserver. For example:
> johnsmith.com. IN SOA ns1.jerrysmith.com. hostmaster.jerrysmith.com. (
> 2002060706; serial
> 3600
> 3600
> 86400
> 86400
> )
> server.johnsmith.com. CNAME machine.jerrysmith.com
> server.johnsmith.com MX machine.jerrysmith.com

Yeah, this is illegal.

> Machine.jerrysmith.com has an A record in jerrysmith.com, and
> server.johnsmith.com. has both this CNAME entry and an MX entry pointing
> to machine.jerrysmith.com.
>
> If I take the CNAME entry out of the johnsmith.com zone file, the zone
> transfer works fine. Is this legal use of a CNAME? Is there a
> configuration in Bind to ignore this?

No, it's not. You can't say, "server.johnsmith.com is only an alias for
machine.jerrysmith.com" and "server.johnsmith.com has this MX record."
The former statement means that any MX record you attach to
machine.jerrysmith.com also belongs to server.johnsmith.com."

I'd just move the MX record to machine.jerrysmith.com and delete
the offensive MX record from server.johnsmith.com.

There's no way to allow this. It's just an error. Anyway, the MX record
you show above is syntactically wrong, since it's missing a preference
value.

cricket