DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Additional Resource Records

There are a number of resource records that we haven’t covered yet in this book. The first of these, HINFO, has been around since the beginning but hasn’t been widely used. The others were defined in RFC 1183 and several successive RFCs. Most are experimental, but some are on the standards track and are coming into more prevalent use. We’ll describe them here to give you a little head start in getting used to them.

Host Information

HINFO stands for host information. The record-specific data is a pair of strings identifying the host’s hardware type and operating system. The strings are supposed to come from the MACHINE NAMES and OPERATING SYSTEM NAMES listed in the Assigned Numbers RFC (currently RFC 1700), but this requirement is not enforced; you can use your own abbreviations. The RFC isn’t at all comprehensive, so it’s quite possible you won’t find your system in the list anyway. Originally, host information records were intended to let services like FTP determine how to interact with a remote system. This would have made it possible to negotiate data type transformations automatically, for example. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen—few sites supply accurate HINFO values for all their systems. Some network administrators use HINFO records to help them keep track of the machine types, instead of recording the machine types in a database or a notebook. Here are two examples of HINFO records (note that the values in the CPU type and Operating system ...