Pony: Stop telling people to decide between CNAME and A records

[andersk]

“You can request a non-MIT hostname, but you'll have to register the hostname yourself and configure it's DNS with a CNAME record for "scripts-vhosts.mit.edu." or an A record for scripts-vhosts.mit.edu's IP address, 18.181.0.46.”

This isn’t useful to the typical user; the choice between CNAME and A is just confusing. Also, there are too many caveats associated with CNAMEs (canonicalization will kill most of your incoming mail, and you can’t use them at the top of a zone). We should just tell all users to use A records.

If for some reason we want to document that CNAMEs are supported even though they’re strictly inferior, we can put that information in an FAQ somewhere, but it shouldn’t be on the Pony form.

[mitchb]

We've been through this before, and multiple of us have strongly felt that it's not right to undocument things that are accurate, and that the way forward here would be to write the FAQ describing both options and the caveats, and to then link to it from pony.

Also, scripts should be nondenominational. It's not the case that cnames are inferior. Plenty of people think they're cleaner because they symbolically make it obvious where a hostname is going. They avoid having to worry about renumbering (neverminding the oddity that scripts changed its hostname once before), etc. They have these two caveats, so we should document that fact. Simple.

[andersk]

Yes, that’s what I said with “put that information in an FAQ somewhere”, which is what we all agreed to do.

I am not attempting to stamp out anyone’s denomination. We should just clearly indicate on the form (and in correspondence with users) that A records are preferred, instead of forcing them to make an arbitrary uninformed decision.

[xavid]

Documentation added to http://scripts.mit.edu/faq/14/do-cnames-work-with-the-script-service and the add blurb updated.