DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Wildcards

Something else we haven’t covered yet is DNS wildcards. At times you want a single resource record to cover any possible name, rather than creating zillions of resource records that are all the same except for the domain name to which they apply. DNS reserves a special character, the asterisk (*), to be used in a DNS data file as a wildcard name. It will match any number of labels in a name, as long as it isn’t an exact match with a name already in the DNS database.

Most often, you’d use wildcards to forward mail to non-Internet-connected networks. Suppose your site is not connected to the Internet, but you have a host that will relay mail between the Internet and your network. You could add a wildcard MX record to the movie.edu zone for Internet consumption that points all your mail to the relay. Here is an example:

*.movie.edu.  IN  MX  10 movie-relay.nea.gov.

Since the wildcard matches one or more labels, this resource record would apply to names like terminator.movie.edu, empire.fx.movie.edu, or casablanca.bogart.classics.movie.edu. The danger with wildcards is that they clash with search lists. This wildcard also matches cujo.movie.edu.movie.edu, making wildcards dangerous to use in your internal zone data. Remember that some mailers apply the search list when looking up MX records:

C:\> nslookup
Default Server:  wormhole.movie.edu 
Address:  192.249.249.1 

> set type=mx       
             -- Look up MX records 
> cujo.movie.edu    
             -- for cujo  Server: wormhole.movie.edu Address: 192.249.249.1 ...