DNS name space best practices

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012, Federico Voges wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm having a hard time trying to convince some people at work, that
>cramming organization (company), environment (dev, QA, prod), data
>center (we have multiple data centers and also use Amazon cloud) and
>the actual host name into the short host name, and using flat DNS name
>space ( XX...XXX.company.com) is a bad idea. I'm proposing to use
>something more sensible like appnameNNN.env.dc.ogranization.com (we
>have multiple domains due to multiple acquisitions). To make it worst,
>they are using the same "field" to specify environment and data
>center.

I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution for this.

As a general rule, people outside an organization probably
shouldn't have to know about network topology to send e-mail
connect to web sites, or similar global activity.  If an
organization has significant functional areas then subdomains can
be very useful allowing use of role addresses such as e-mail
addresses sales at boats.example.com and sales at horses.example.com.

On the other hand, using subdomains for internal use can make
life a lot easier with hostnames like router.sea.example.com and
router.dfx.example.com define function and location nicely.

We use split-horizon DNS quite a bit with each office having its
own DNS for the internal, private LAN.  This internal structure
is hidden from the outside world, but available for internal use.
This is fairly easy using DJBDNS (flame suit on) although it can
have some 'interesting' side effects.

Generally speaking I think that the DNS seen by the public should
be done to make things as simple and logical as possible for the
outside world, and that internal architecture should be limited
to those with a need to know.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

The parasite government is not going to keep growing faster than
the host economy for very much longer; either the economy will
kill the parasite or the parasite will kill the economy. Either
way the parasite will lose its power over the rest of the world. 
    Bill Walker -- http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker39.1.html