2017-10-13 - News - Tony Finch
We have relaxed the rules for external references from the cam.ac.uk
domain
so that CNAMEs are no longer required; external references can refer
to IP addresses when a hostname isn't available.
One of the reasons for the old policy was that the IP Register database only knows about IP addresses on the CUDN. However, an old caveat says, "CUDN policy is not defined by this database, rather the reverse." The old policy proved to be inconvenient both for the Hostmaster team and for our colleagues around the University who requested external references. We didn't see any benefit to compensate for this inconvenience, so we have relaxed the policy.
At the moment we aren't easily able to change the structure of the IP
Register database. In order to work around the technical limitations,
when we need to make an external reference to an IP address, the
Hosmaster team will create the address records in the domain
ucam.biz and set up a CNAME in the database from cam.ac.uk to
ucam.biz. This is slightly more fiddly for the Hostmaster team but
we expect that it will make the overall process easier.