RFC 2052 (rfc2052) - Page 3 of 10

A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)

RFC 2052                       DNS SRV RR                   October 1996


   Weight
        Load balancing mechanism.  When selecting a target host among
        the those that have the same priority, the chance of trying this
        one first SHOULD be proportional to its weight.  The range of
        this number is 1-65535.  Domain administrators are urged to use
        Weight 0 when there isn't any load balancing to do, to make the
        RR easier to read for humans (less noisy).

   Port
        The port on this target host of this service.  The range is
        0-65535.  This is often as specified in Assigned Numbers but
        need not be.

   Target
        As for MX, the domain name of the target host.  There MUST be
        one or more A records for this name. Implementors are urged, but
        not required, to return the A record(s) in the Additional Data
        section.  Name compression is to be used for this field.

        A Target of "." means that the service is decidedly not
        available at this domain.

Domain administrator advice

   Asking everyone to update their telnet (for example) clients when the
   first internet site adds a SRV RR for Telnet/TCP is futile (even if
   desirable).  Therefore SRV will have to coexist with A record lookups
   for a long time, and DNS administrators should try to provide A
   records to support old clients:

      - Where the services for a single domain are spread over several
        hosts, it seems advisable to have a list of A RRs at the same
        DNS node as the SRV RR, listing reasonable (if perhaps
        suboptimal) fallback hosts for Telnet, NNTP and other protocols
        likely to be used with this name.  Note that some programs only
        try the first address they get back from e.g. gethostbyname(),
        and we don't know how widespread this behaviour is.

      - Where one service is provided by several hosts, one can either
        provide A records for all the hosts (in which case the round-
        robin mechanism, where available, will share the load equally)
        or just for one (presumably the fastest).

      - If a host is intended to provide a service only when the main
        server(s) is/are down, it probably shouldn't be listed in A
        records.





Gulbrandsen & Vixie           Experimental