Address Forwarding via ANAME
Support for ANAME (ALIAS) pseudo DNS records in ironDNS®.
The Idea
There are situations in which you do not want to or are not able to specify a pre-defined destination IP address for your domain. Your domain example.com cannot simply point to 1.2.3.4.
A typical solution would be to employ a CNAME record pointing to another domain name. A CNAME, however, cannot exist at the zone apex as it may not exist next to any other DNS records (and the apex always has SOA and NS records). Another "problem" with CNAME is that it forwards all queries, not just A and AAAA. This might not be intended.
The Solution
ironDNS® implements the ANAME draft according to its specification and thereby offers you to set an ANAME record. Similar to CNAMEs you can define another domain to be the target of any A or AAAA queries. However, unlike with CNAMEs, you can have your ANAME record at any location in your zone as it can coexist with other records like SOA or MX.
How it works
The syntax of an ANAME is exactly the same as that of a CNAME:
owner ttl class ANAME target
Example:
foo.com. 3600 IN ANAME bar.org.
In the above example all A and AAAA queries to the domain foo.com return the A or AAAA records that are set for the domain bar.org.
Using ANAME records for your ironDNS® zones.
Literal Zones
In case you are using the literal zone set-up of ironDNS® you can simply add your ANAME records to the zone as you would do with any other type of record (see the above example).
Plain and easy to use.
Source Server
If you are using source servers to provision your zone to ironDNS® the set-up is slightly more involved due to the fact that ANAME is not a standard DNS record and therefore not understood by your regular name server. In order to help you with setting up the correct record, we provide the below conversion tool that generates a format that is syntactically correct on all name servers.
Convert Your ANAME Record
In case you need to define the ANAME record outside of ironDNS®, you can use the following form to calculate the record you need to put into your zone. When ironDNS® fetches such a record it will apply the ANAME functionality.
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