[Dnsmasq-discuss] CNAME trouble with no AAAA

[Dominick C. Pastore]

Hello,

I'm having a bit of a problem with the "cname" option in Dnsmasq. I have some configuration options like these in dnsmasq.conf, where "host1" and "host2" have IPv4 addresses from DHCP:

domain=philadelphia.example.com
local=/philadelphia.example.com/
cname=git.example.com,host1.philadelphia.example.com
cname=nas.example.com,host2.philadelphia.example.com

This works well for A lookups on git.example.com and nas.example.com, but the cname options are ignored for AAAA lookups. I think this is by design, since the man page says the target of a cname must be known or it will be ignored. (Although, maybe this is unintentional in this case? It does seem like a bit of a bug for a name to *sometimes* be a CNAME, depending on the request type.) Unfortunately, it's causing problems when the AAAA queries are forwarded upstream, but I'm not sure how to fix it since these servers don't have IPv6 addresses.

For some background:

The goal is to provide something like split-horizon DNS. Host1 and host2 reside behind NAT. On public DNS, philadelphia.example.com resolves to their public address, with git.example.com and nas.example.com both being CNAMEs to that name. But within the LAN, git.example.com and nas.example.com should be CNAMEs to their local names.

The problem is, some clients cache their DNS requests. When these clients send a AAAA request, it gets forwarded upstream and they end up caching the public CNAME record. Then, they use the (incorrect) cached CNAME for A requests, too.

Is there a good way to solve this?

Thanks,
Nick