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Comment by namecast | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how ALIAS records are becoming a de-facto DNS protocol feature. Despite not having even an RFC draft proposing their existence, GitHub recommends using ALIAS records, and large players (e.g. AWS, Dyn, and DNSSimple IIRC, as well as us) now support adding ALIAS records to a domain.

I wonder why ALIAS took hold but DNAME and ANAME records were never widely supported despite actually making it into a few RFCs. Hrmm.

(Disclaimer: Namecast (http://www.namecast.net) supports ALIAS records as well, so I have an abnormal interest in what was otherwise a small part of the article.)

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> (Disclaimer: Namecast (http://www.namecast.net) supports ALIAS records as well, so I have an abnormal interest in what was otherwise a small part of the article.)

Kudos, this is one of the most subtle advertising comments I've seen yet.

Sorry, it really wasn't meant to be. (And I think anyone "advertising" on HN in that way would be dealt with pretty quickly.)

Mine was originally one of the first comments on the article, and it turns out lots of people have had questions about ALIAS records since then, because "what's an ALIAS record?". (If you read the comments, I've actually been advertising for our "competitors" if anything - I think I got DNSMadeEasy a sale today ;).

The worst part of ALIAS is that traditional hosted DNS servers don't support it, as far as I can see. Usually CDN providers do handle static IP addresses at the zone apex somehow, but in this case it seems they don't.

It's not a real record in the sense that it's never sent to the client so it doesn't really matter no ? It's just a convenient way to say "return an A record or that fqdn" on the configuration side.

Yeah, you should never see anything like "IN ALIAS" in the output of dig, for example, and getaddrinfo(3) wouldn't know what to do with that sort of record. It's all internal to the authoritative NS.

...which is a bummer, because doing this adds a weird sort of black box step in the DNS resolution chain between client and server. It makes troubleshooting DNS problems not so much fun.

Agreed and the option is often displayed along other real DNS records names adding to the confusion if you're not familiar with DNS systems.

DNSMadeEasy apparently supports ANAME records (according to their docs); ANAME's are essentially ALIAS records with a different qtype (though from what I remember, the RFC that proposed them is now deprecated.)

+1 for DNSMadeEasy. The interface is not the best but their pricing is really competitive and their product super stable.

Oh wow. I was doing a transfer of some sites and at the same time looking for a good + affordable DNS service and went with http://freedns.afraid.org/. Seeing that I can get even better service for under $2/month at DNSMadeEasy makes for a compelling proposition.

No support for ALIAS on namecheap

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