--On 19 June 2009 12:54:17 +0200 Alessandro Vesely <vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it>
wrote:
John Levine wrote:
Isn't the FQDN for a host the host name "dot" the domain name?
The FQDN for a host is the host's FQDN. As we've all noted, there's
lots of heuristics to guess domain names, none of which work.
What about the other way around: given a domain and an IP address, can we
say whether the IP address "is a member of" the domain?
"is a member of" isn't a useful description of relationships between IP
addresses and domain names.
You can say that an IP address "is a member of" a netblock. You can say
that a domain name "is a subdomain" of another domain, and could regard
that as a "membership" relation.
The DNS is used to express relationships between IP addresses and domain
names, but there are many types of relationship - like MX records, A
records. "is a member of" sounds like it might mean "is owned by" or "is
assigned to", but IP addresses are assigned to real world organisations,
not domain names. There's no necessary relationship when sending SMTP,
unfortunately.
You could check whether the IP address and the domain name were assigned to
the same organisation, but that often won't be possible.
Vhlo mentions the following three ways to determine that, without
apparently resorting to heuristics. I'm wondering how sound it is to rely
on those, or similar, techniques.
* rDNS returns a name whose right part matches the domain name,
* an MX record for the domain mentions a host with the given IP,
* the IP address passes the SPF check for that domain.
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Ian Eiloart
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