We are trying to move all our websites we host to CNAMES as we are planning on moving servers in the new year and would like the ability to move some clients to one server and other clients somewhere else. We were planning on giving clients a unique CNAME which we can then change at a later date. (We have other reasons for doing this now but that is the main one)
We have been testing out this theory with a few of our own domains and it seemed to be fine. However when checking the MX records on a domain I got the CNAME value back rather than the MX record.
Sadly all of these domains are done via control panels, but I am guessing they are just writing zone files for me.
I want to create 2 CNAMEs for the company.com
company.com. IN CNAME client.dns.ourserver.com
www IN CNAME client.dns.ourserver.com
The MX record is something like the following:
company.com IN MX 10 mail.company.com
We have an A record for mail.company.com
Doing:
host -t mx company.com
Returns the CNAME value rather than the mx record.
Is this expected behaviour?
I have managed to get the above configuration working with the 123-reg.co.uk control panel, but not sure if that is more luck than anything.
Best Answer
This is a common error. You cannot use a CNAME RR for your root domain (e.g. company.com) and define additional resource records for the same zone.
See Why can't I create a CNAME record for the root record? and RFC1034 section 3.6.2 for details: