DNS: Zone name vs. Host name question

Question

My little office OSX Server setup has been working fine, but I realized my DNS setup was a little weird. I think the primary zone and first host machine record were setup during the initial install/setup process, and it doesn't seem to match what Hoffman recommends in his excellent DNS Setup guide.
My primary zone was named "files.example.com", and my server host record was also named "files.example.com". Everything seemed to work, but I realized when I wanted to add some additional hosts and aliases, I was getting something like "mail.files.example.com", when what I wanted was "www.example.com".
Hoffman, and others, recommend trashing the default zone and records, and making a new zone named "example.com", then making a machine record for the server, "files.example.com".
That makes perfect sense, except I don't understand one thing: how, with this setup, can I get the dns to cough up an ip address for hostname "example.com"? Can I make a machine record with a blank hostname, thus yielding a hostname that is the same as the zone name?
Thanks.

Answer 1

RobertNichols wrote:
My little office OSX Server setup has been working fine, but I realized my DNS setup was a little weird. I think the primary zone and first host machine record were setup during the initial install/setup process, and it doesn't seem to match what Hoffman recommends in his excellent DNS Setup guide.
My primary zone was named "files.example.com", and my server host record was also named "files.example.com". Everything seemed to work, but I realized when I wanted to add some additional hosts and aliases, I was getting something like "mail.files.example.com", when what I wanted was "www.example.com".
Hoffman, and others, recommend trashing the default zone and records, and making a new zone named "example.com", then making a machine record for the server, "files.example.com".
That makes perfect sense, except I don't understand one thing: how, with this setup, can I get the dns to cough up an ip address for hostname "example.com"? Can I make a machine record with a blank hostname, thus yielding a hostname that is the same as the zone name?
Thanks.
Apple setup wizard creates a zonename like files.example.com i.e. the same as the host name. I totally agree with Hoffman this is wrong (and I reported it as a bug to Apple) but that is the way Apple do it until 10.7 at least.
I therefore do the same as Hoffman and trash Apple's auto-created zone and do it myself.
Note: The auto-zone format used by Apple will work and might be 'good enough' for a small simple internal only setup, but if your doing a more complex multi-server setup and especially if your going to do split-horizon DNS, it is a terrible setup.