DNS Zone Name

Question

In a DNS zone file, for the type 'A', what is the difference between the name '*' and the name'@'?

What does each do?

* A myIp

@ A myIp

Also if anyone knows a nice tutorial on editing and fine-tuning DNS zone file in general I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The @ symbol means that nothing comes before the domain name and * means that anything can come before the domain name.

Refer: http://www.ipprimer.com/dns.cfm

Answer 2

The @ symbol represents the current (fully qualified) domain name, as usually set with $ORIGIN.

The * symbol is the wildcard label - the DNS server will respond to queries for unknown labels with the data from here