Any DNS guru's on here?

[Brian]

If so I have a couple questions about reverse dns and PTR records. Namely how to prevent people from doing reverse lookups.

[Nate]

Don't list a PTR?

I can't see how you could possibly prevent outside parties from doing a lookup. All you can do is make the information unavailable.

[Brian]

It seems that our dns server automatically resolves PTR records rather than having you manually insert them into the database. It looks like I will need to get in and see if I can disable the feature. I don't want to keep people from searching for the info as I know that is impossible, I just don't want the info to be found when they do search for it.

[M@]

Directly from my network/server admin that hosts all my shit (good friend of mine)...

"it needs to be delegated to his otherwise it will show up as whatever his isp (owner of the ip) has set it a lot of times you can't get a single ip delegated to you for reverse resolution you can't just prevent people from looking up your ip.you need cooperation of the ISP to either remove it from their zone files or set it to something bogus"

Don't mind the lack of punctuation, it was taken from a few IM's and thrown together. :p

[Brian]

No, I realize the above. It will show our server host info, but I don't care about that. The goal is simply to prevent reverse dns lookups from showing the number of domains hosted on a given ip address. Right now I am blocking the ip's via a firewall which works fine, I just want to go a step further and spoof or remove the PTR records.

[Weston-work]

Sounds like a "feature" of your particular DNS server, so the answer to your question is most likely going to be specific to your software... I've always had to add the PTR records myself for reverse lookups, otherwise they don't resolve. I'm not using anything fancy though... just good 'ol BIND.

[justin]

So, people can see how many name based virtual websites you are running on an IP? What's the big deal? PTR's are good, and becoming more and more necessary, but not required by RFC...yet (far as I know). Especially in the email world now with endless spam, you pretty much need a PTR for your smtp servers. If you are managing DNS for the domain(s) then it's easy, just put in one PTR for whatever domain you want it to resolve to in the reverse zone.

[john]

If you want to do any type of email exchange on the box, you will need a reverse record. If not, then don't publish the reverse record.

Are you running your own DNS or does your provider do it for you? If the latter, request that the provider delete the PTR.