The below is my notes on how DNS is used. This document is neither accurate nor authoritative, just meandering. You’ve been warned.

DNS administration is like the story of the blindmen and the elephant. Many people find that do a significant amount of DNS administration only perform a subset of activities that map to their companies business use of DNS. Usage patterns include:

A Large organization that provides a hostname for each users desktop system.

An online service provider that maps subdomains from their clients to small number servers providing cutomized content.

A ISP that hosts a large number of domains managed by the ISPs clients, each on a virtual server that runs on a smaller number of physical servers

The clients of that ISP that need to create subdomains for specific uses (CMS, web services etc).

Software development shops that create subdomains for a small subset of users who need to routinely create and destroy large numbers of host entries.

Typically, the usage falls into a small number of use cases:

1. View and edit all of the records associated with a single host
2. Create or edit a Zone based on a template or simple business rules

Of the record types we handle, it makes sense to look at their expected cardinality:

A: Typically, an A Record is canonical, not just for a public name, but for man y CNAME records pointing to that host. It hast the split identity of being the name that everyone uses to refer to some resources, but also acts as an insulation layer between a large number of CNAME record alias and a IPAddress that may change over time.

CNAME: Often these will refer to A records not even in the same domain. While the recommended usage states that a CNAMe should only point to an A Record, in practice people can point one CNAME to another CNAME record. This usage is common when the first CNAME is managed by one organization, and the second is managed by the ISP for the first.

SRV Records are rare, but require much more information than a A, AAAA, CNAME, PTR etx record. Like a CNAME or PTR, part of the SRC record is a pointer to another host, and again, this should be a Canonical target (A Record).

It probably makes sense for us to force A records to be HOST entries, and to use those to populate the values for CNAME, SRC, PTR, SRV, etc records.

Certain large organizations are going to take a Zone based approach to DNS. For an ISP, each customer is likely to have a Domain name and will need certain basic records. At a minimum, they need an A or CNAME record for the main host that they manage, even if this host is shared buy other users. Management of those Zones may be delegated to the customers. They are also likely to want MX record for their domain. This is likely to point to a centralized mail server for all customers, where the mail will be sorted based on spam filtering before delivery. Again, it should point to an A record. The RFC is pretty clear on this point, so it is unclear whether people actually have MX records which refer to CNAME records.

PTR records typically are used for Reverse DNS lookups. As such, DNS should return only one record for a given hostname, although different hostnames may all map to the same IP address. It may not make sense to force this onto an IPA Host object, as it is likely that the end user will want to move the IP address from one host to another, and have all of the PTR records remain valid. However, without forcing it onto a host object, we have no way to say “show me all of the hostnames that map to this IP address.”

Of the many forms of Key and certificate records, none of them seem to point to other hosts, but are instead associated with a zone. For example, DNSSEC uses the Key record. It is requested based on a Hostname, and returns a key. The IPSEC record is an exception, but we do not currently support that record type.

It is unlikely that we will need explicit records for NSEC* records, as they basically say “The host you requested does not exist.” Since DNS provides a Canonical answer about existence, denying the existence of a host that does exist tends to break things. Instead, I suspect that these records are autogenerated based on the set of hostnames that we *do* provide answers for.

SIG records do not refer to hosts. RRSIG records, which we support use this format. Instead, the sign a record sets.

SOA records are 1-to-1 with a zone. As such, the CLI methods dns-add, dns-mod etc modify the SOA for a given zone. The MNAME is a server that Manges the records. In an ideal world, this would be a host in IPA, so we can see all thet zones managed by a given DNS server.

Really, there are two use cases for creating a zone:

1. I want the IPA server to manage the zone. it will be the MNAME field for the DNS record.

2. I want IPA to act as the caching server for the zone, which is managed by a remote server.

The two use cases are mutually exclusive. It seems that really, only the first makes sense. The second case is really a degenerate case of “act as a caching DNS server for remote server X” where all unresolved queries get forwarded to server X, and the results cached for future use.

Here is the full list of Record ttypes supported in IPA, including my notes:

The ipa add dns-rr command takes the options:

ZONE RESOURCE TYPE DATA

Of these fields, Zone will be pre-populated with the Zone from the details page.

resource will be a string in one of the DNS style formats, but for our purposes can be freeform text.

This is the list of record types supported by IPA:

‘A’, ‘AAAA’, ‘A6’, ‘AFSDB’, ‘CERT’, ‘CNAME’, ‘DNAME’,
‘DS’, ‘HINFO’, ‘KEY’, ‘KX’, ‘LOC’, ‘MD’, ‘MINFO’, ‘MX’,
‘NAPTR’, ‘NS’, ‘NSEC’, ‘NXT’, ‘PTR’, ‘RRSIG’, ‘SSHFP’,
‘SRV’, ‘TXT’,

We are currently updating the DNS plugin to use the same baseldap functionality that the other plugins do.  Once that is done, the commands will change.  I’ll post an update once that gets committed.