DNS A Record for TLD

Hello all,

I am just wondering what the proper way to handle an A record at the TLD.

A long time ago, I was told that I should never, ever have an A record for my example.com domain. I should also never have a * wildcard either.

I have all my subdomain/server addresses set for actual A records and nothing for the Top Level.

I have been going back and forth with people about this and we have been looking up RFC's.

Is there any preference to this? Any right or wrong way.

Tom

You need an A record for example.com. As for wildcards, these are used for any subdomains, any this is more of a personal preference. I know people that use wildcards for their domains. I, personally, explicitly name A records for all of my subdomains.

I have been looking around and got all kinds of links that talk about naked TLD. I remember being told a long time ago that, if you define your hosts, you shouldn't need an A record. In fact, if you do not have an A record, bots will not be able to chose a domain and attack that address. Whereas, if you do, they can just attack every port and service on example.com. It would take extra work to have to specify www, ftp, telnet, etc.example.com

thoughts?

Tom

Without an A record, example.com is not assigned an IP.

As for bots... well, I'm sure it's just as easy for a bot to attack example.com as it is www.example.com.

Basically you need an A record to point a domain to an IP... whether example.com, www.example.com, ftp.example.com, etc.example.com ...

Although it may seem to work fine if you don't point example.com to the IP, it is incorrect, and most likely will cause problems especially if you start adding more and more domains to the server.