MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 4.5-ADMINISTRING COLDFUSION SERVER Manual page 186

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Note
This section addresses the following topics:
Understanding local and primary DNS servers
Configuring DNS records on your primary DNS server
Understanding local and primary DNS servers
The two types of DNS servers involved in the name-to-IP mapping translation are
primary DNS servers and local DNS servers.
The primary DNS server is a computer that runs DNS software, which provides the
final mapping of your Web site name to the computer that your Web site actually
resides on. The primary DNS server may be located anywhere on the Internet, but
most reside either in the same physical location as the Web servers or at the ISP that
provides the connection between your Web servers and the Internet.
The primary DNS server contains tables of forward and reverse name translations. For
example, forward translation entries (A records) would look like this:
www1.company.com
www2.company.com
Reverse translation entries (PTR records) are just the opposite and would look like this:
192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2
It's important that you configure your Web sites to have both forward and reverse DNS
entries on your primary DNS server. If you are not responsible for maintaining your
primary DNS server, be sure to tell your DNS administrator to add both forward and
reverse entries for your explicit Web server names (www1.company.com,
www2.company.com, etc.). If both forward and reverse translations aren't configured
for each explicit Web server, ClusterCATS won't operate correctly.
A local DNS server usually resides at the Web hosting facility. The local DNS server
stores its own local table of name translations for the Web sites that the browser has
visited. If a user enters a URL of a site in a browser that the browser has already visited,
it retrieves the host name-to-IP address translation from the local DNS server's table.
However, if a user enters a URL for a site that the browser on that computer has never
visited, the local DNS server must access the primary DNS server on the Internet to
This section assumes that your primary DNS server is already set up
correctly. If it is not, consult a DNS configuration book or a DNS
consultant to help prepare your DNS server. We recommend that you do
not use a Hosts file in a production environment, as it is less reliable than
DNS.
192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2
www1.company.com
www2.company.com
Administering ColdFusion Server