Ask questions about dedicated servers here and we and other users will do our best to answer them. Please also refer to the self-help section for tutorials and answers to the most commonly asked questions.
Hi all!
I was perusing my server control panel when i noticed a section I have ignored/never really used before- The reverse DNS section. At the risk of screwing something up or worse, I wanted to ask what is this feature used for and its practical uses when running servers. I have attached an image so that it is easy to see what I am talking about:
The reverse DNS is used by many services to determine more information about a client, hand-in-hand with a forward DNS entry that points to the same IP. IRC servers have historically used it, for instance; it is displayed in the output of many webserver log parsers; and it shows in a traceroute to the IP.
It's particularly important when running a mail server; defining relevant forward and reverse DNS entries is a necessity, because most mail hosts will not accept mail from others that do not.