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Once upon a time, when a new machine was registered on my university's network, it became machineName.univ.edu.

Recently something changed, and now it would be machineName.primary.ad.univ.edu.

This is an awful change in terms of usability for a public-facing web server (that address is hard to remember). I've requested that it be changed back to the old way, but unfortunately, "that is not the current policy." This gets more annoying because I purchased SSL certificates pointing to "machineName.univ.edu" a while back, and now most browsers inform my users that they aren't on the site they think they are, etc.

Is there a way to rectify this? If I can get an ANAME (or maybe it's CNAME?) record to point from machineName.univ.edu -> machineName.primary.ad.univ.edu, will this solve the issue? This is out of my area of expertise, so I apologize for the bad wording.

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I voted to migrate to ServerFault, but this actually might be more on-topic for Pro Webmasters... – Shinrai Oct 17 '11 at 19:56
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migrated from superuser.com Oct 17 '11 at 21:17

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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

From what I see, you have your solution, you need a CNAME record or an additional A record pointing your old hostname to your new name, other that not too mucho to do.

I would suggest getting your own domain name (which you can control and configure) so in the future such changes doesn't affect you.

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The tricky part is that since the university controls DNS, they may not want to grant the request. – afrazier Oct 17 '11 at 20:13
I have the same situation a years ago (also at our University) and since that we migrated to our own domain and can manage our hostnames at our convenience. – jhcaiced Oct 17 '11 at 23:00
worst case, a dynamic DNS client could be used for free. But I agree, having your own domain is better. – afrazier Oct 18 '11 at 0:06
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up vote 1 down vote

Ask for the CNAME, but if possible also considering longer-term migration to sitename.univ.edu. rather than machinename.univ.edu.

You should make a distinction between the name that the machine thinks it has, and the name of the services that it is offering to the outside world. Not least, this would enable you to reprovision those services to another machine if needed.

Requiring machines to have a designated hostname (or machinename) within the site DNS is a generally reasonable requirement, particularly if as it appears this is part of an Active Directory based system.

However the University's site people should also recognise the need for specific services to have short names, and hence permit creation of the CNAME that you require.

They should also recognise that it's undesirable to have University services ending up on domain names that are not part of their "brand".

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up vote -1 down vote

What's wrong with long names? You can go for a CNAME, but avoiding CNAME chains is usually better.

If your problem is long typing, consider a simple "search domain" in your resolver, or see /etc/hosts in unix.

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