# Anyone ever use a DNAME record?



## yaho (Mar 31, 2010)

Just wondering if anyone's ever used a DNAME record as opposed to a CNAME? Any problems or pitfalls (I know they're not really recommended in the longer term)?

Situation is that I'm looking at a couple of event management web apps to manage sign-ups, etc. without building custom forms for our site all the time. To tie the URLs in with our domain, I was thinking of setting up an events.example.com subdomain on our site and pointing it towards our webapp.com/events/OurName page on the external site.

Looks to me like a DNAME would give more options and allow us to link to specific event pages each time but am I missing something?


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I had never heard of a DNAME record before. From what I've casually skimmed, it appears to be a relatively new record so the main question I would have is how widely spread is support for it by DNS servers currently in use. I don't know if the DNAME spec is backward compatible with CNAME records for DNS servers not yet supporting DNAME.

As for your intended use, I don't think a DNAME would do what you want. I would suggest looking at these two pages which offer brief descriptions of DNAME with comparisons to CNAME:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=19798
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record#DNAME_record

Peace...


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