Wandering Thoughts archives

2021-02-28

Dot-separated DNS name components aren't even necessarily subdomains, illustrated

I recently wrote an entry about my pragmatic sysadmin view on subdomains and DNS zones. At the end of the entry I mentioned that we had a case where we had DNS name components that didn't create what I thought of as a subdomain, in the form of the hostnames we assign for the IPMIs of our servers. These names are in the form '<host>.ipmi.core.sandbox' (in one of our internal sandboxes), but I said that 'ipmi.core.sandbox' is neither a separate DNS zone nor something that I consider a subdomain.

There's only one problem with this description; it's wrong. It's been so long since I actually dealt with an IPMI hostname that I mis-remembered our naming scheme for them, which I discovered when I needed to poke at one by hand the other day. Our actual IPMI naming scheme puts the 'ipmi' bit first, giving us host names of the form 'ipmi.<host>.core.sandbox' (as before, for the IPMI for <host>; the host itself doesn't have an interface on the core.sandbox subnet).

What this naming scheme creates is middle name components that clearly don't create subdomains in any meaningful sense. If we have host1, host2, and host3 with IPMIs, we get the following IPMI names:

ipmi.host1.core.sandbox
ipmi.host2.core.sandbox
ipmi.host3.core.sandbox

It's pretty obviously silly to talk about 'host1.core.sandbox' being a subdomain, much more so than 'ipmi.core.sandbox' in my first IPMI naming scheme. These names could as well be 'ipmi-<host>'; we just picked a dot instead of a dash as a separator, and dot has special meaning in host names. The 'ipmi.core.sandbox' version would at least create a namespace in core.sandbox for IPMIs, while this version has no single namespace for them, instead scattering the names all over.

(The technicality here is DNS resolver search paths. You could use 'host1.core.sandbox' as a DNS search path, although it would be silly.)

PS: Tony Finch also wrote about "What is a subdomain?" in an entry that's worth reading, especially for historical and general context.

sysadmin/SubdomainsAndDNSZonesII written at 22:39:58; Add Comment


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