# PowerDNS can't resolve external CNAME?



## chillybsd (Jul 1, 2011)

I'm trying to move away from using BIND on my home network, and have been playing around with dns/unbound and dns/powerdns-recursor. Unbound has been working pretty well, but powerdns-recursor is giving me issues.

Here's the problem.  There's a domain on the internet, let's say worknet.com.  On my powerdns-recursor box, I can *nslookup worknet.com* and get the appropriate answer.  On that domain is a CNAME record, mail.worknet.com which redirects to ghs.google.com (Google Apps hosted email address).  So when I want to check mail I would hit mail.worknet.com and it would redirect me to ghs.google.com and then show me the mail login for worknet.com.

When using BIND, *nslookup* returns the correct answer, ghs.google.com, when looking up mail.worknet.com.  When using unbound, it also returns the correct answer.  When I use powerdns-recursor, *nslookup* returns

```
** server can't find mail.worknet.com: NXDOMAIN
```

I Googled the message and found that other people have had this same behavior with powerdns and external CNAMEs, but the posts were pretty old (like a year+), so I figured it should be fixed by now.  So, I'm wondering if anyone familiar with this can tell me what I need to do to get this working   Thanks for reading.


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