Jeff Chan wrote:
Good to know. So wildcards sound like they *don't* necessarily save on DNS traffic, right?
Right, but if one has a local AXFR or rsync of the zone, that's not an issue. They DO massivly save on memory on the DNS server if you've got a massive zone.
Only if the wildcard is replacing multiple entries though ? Which is not the case with surbl.org. Here we're considering the difference between having one entry like:
spammer.com IN A 127.0.0.2
or one entry like:
*.spammer.com IN A 127.0.0.2
With the current approach individual randomized (or not) subdomains aren't being seperately listed anyway, they are stripped down and collated into their registrar level domain names before going into the zone files.. (Right Jeff ?)
Same number of records, just a different representation which requires the client end to do the same stripping down, (slightly more work) but with the added bonus of much better caching on the client nameservers..
Regards, Simon