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We have certain stakeholders who believe that the public IPs used by our workstations should have globally available DNS records, and that not having dns records would break some internet services. I've heard of this need in the past, but in this day and age do I still need to make dns records available to the world for our workstation IP address space?

HopelessN00b
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JaredK
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    I'm sorry... what? – MichelZ Jul 15 '14 at 17:38
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    Well, the workstations will have a hard time sending out spam without them... – Michael Hampton Jul 15 '14 at 17:38
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    Your stakeholders are mistaken. You should to ask them to clarify their position so that you can address their specific concerns. What internet services do they think will break without having these "globally" available DNS records? – joeqwerty Jul 15 '14 at 17:43
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    There are services which do DNS lookups and reverse DNS lookups; email/SMTP services will for spam checks and they can dislike connections from addresses with no reverse DNS entries, SSH can for connections, and having a weak configuration will cause problems or slowness at logon. But presumably you relay email through a server you control. If your workstations have public IPs, surely you already know whether internet services are breaking ... because the things you are trying to do aren't working? – TessellatingHeckler Jul 15 '14 at 19:09
  • I've answered this with [a question of my own](http://serverfault.com/questions/612833/do-internet-standards-require-reverse-dns-for-every-device), because damned if it doesn't keep coming up in my own professional life. – Andrew B Jul 16 '14 at 00:23
  • I don't think that it's necessary or wise to register those IPs in dns, but for some reason verizon FIOS goes through the trouble to give a reverse response for my gateway address at home. – JaredK Jul 16 '14 at 18:17
  • Lots of things will perform an implicit reverse DNS lookup. Unless required by the protocol/application in question, those programs will gracefully report the IP address in the failure to perform the reverse lookup. Quite frequently, those automatic lookups end up being disabled to save time. (trivia: the `-n` option contributes more to hand strain worldwide across UNIX commands than `-h`, because at least in the latter case you can get to a point where you need it less frequently) – Andrew B Jul 16 '14 at 21:25

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No.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

HopelessN00b
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I don't know any obligatory to have DNS Records for public IP Addresses. I don't see the anything why this should be important.

CookieCrash
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