hello linode

I have an instance that I am looking to turn into a zimbra server. As you might already know DNS is very important to setting up zimbra. And of course for zimbra and postfix in general it's important to get your reverse dns right.

Well I set up my reverse DNS in the linode interface by going to remote access -> reverse dns and added the A record for my mail server in the format mail.jokefire.com. My ip address is correctly returned by the linode system.

This was about two days ago. Yet when I do a host -t ptr on this a record I get this response:

[bluethundr@bluethundr-laptop:~]#host -t ptr mail.jokefire.com
mail.jokefire.com has no PTR record

I am assuming at this point that this is a flaw in the linode system. How can I get past this error?

thanks

The hostname doesn't get a ptr record for reverse DNS. You have to put the IP address in little-endian byte order, append .in-addr.arpa, and then look up the ptr record for that. `host` does that last part for you.

$ host mail.jokefire.com
mail.jokefire.com has address 173.255.227.79
$ host -t ptr 173.255.227.79
79.227.255.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer mail.jokefire.com.
$

It's working fine.