Hi,

I was just reading the Cobalt RAQ documentation on their website (just for fun) :) (may be i will take up a RAQ in near future).

I found a comment made by them only !

<snip>
CNAME is an evil. Do not use it.
</snip>

Is it true ?
I am not sure. I am using Plesk on my server and it created three CNAMES for each site i host.

Or is this a special problem for Cobalt RAQ's.

Regards
Abhishek Rungta

I've never had any problems using CNAME's. Maybe it's something specific to RaQs? But for other servers, I'm not aware of any problems that would be caused by using a CNAME instead of an A record.

I've also read from a UNIX DNS tutorial (eBooks) that the use of CNAME should be avoided but didn't explain why. I've also read that Cobalt doc mentioned so I got the impression that there might be something wrong using CNAME. But several DNS servers I've used uses CNAME freely and there seem to be nothing wrong with it.

CNAME is a Good Thing. Unfortunately Sendmail breaks when it encounters CNAMEs (actually they might have fixed that by now, but it used to break), so using CNAMEs is like driving at the speed limit -- theoretically a better idea but practically speaking a very good way of causing an accident.

There are no circumstances where you *need* to use CNAMEs, so don't bother.

I recall reading an article about cnames that cautioned against using them as they place a heavier load on a DNS server than using A records. If I can still find it I will post a link to it here.

Never had any problems out of CNAME's they seem to work fine 99.9% of the time for us.. Also plesk is great as well...