How to overcome root domain CNAME restrictions?

CNAME'ing a root record is technically not against RFC, but does have limitations meaning it is a practice that is not recommended.

Normally your root record will have multiple entries. Say, 3 for your name servers and then one for an IP address.

Per RFC:

If a CNAME RR is present at a node, no other data should be present;

And Per IETF 'Common DNS Operational and Configuration Errors' Document:

This is often attempted by inexperienced administrators as an obvious way to allow your domain name to also be a host. However, DNS servers like BIND will see the CNAME and refuse to add any other resources for that name. Since no other records are allowed to coexist with a CNAME, the NS entries are ignored. Therefore all the hosts in the podunk.xx domain are ignored as well!

References:

• https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1912 section '2.4 CNAME Records'
• http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html section '3.6.2. Aliases and canonical names'

The reason this question still often arises is because, as you mentioned, somewhere somehow someone presumed as important wrote that the RFC states domain names without subdomain in front of them are not valid. If you read the RFC carefully, however, you'll find that this is not exactly what it says. In fact, RFC 1912 states:

Don't go overboard with CNAMEs. Use them when renaming hosts, but plan to get rid of them (and inform your users).

Some DNS hosts provide a way to get CNAME-like functionality at the zone apex (the root domain level, for the naked domain name) using a custom record type. Such records include, for example:

• ALIAS at DNSimple
• ANAME at DNS Made Easy
• ANAME at easyDNS
• CNAME at CloudFlare

For each provider, the setup is similar: point the ALIAS or ANAME entry for your apex domain to example.domain.com, just as you would with a CNAME record. Depending on the DNS provider, an empty or @ Name value identifies the zone apex.

ALIAS or ANAME or @ example.domain.com.

If your DNS provider does not support such a record-type, and you are unable to switch to one that does, you will need to use subdomain redirection, which is not that hard, depending on the protocol or server software that needs to do it.

I strongly disagree with the statement that it's done only by "amateur admins" or such ideas. It's a simple "What does the name and its service need to do?" deal, and then to adapt your DNS config to serve those wishes; If your main services are web and e-mail, I don' t see any VALID reason why dropping the CNAMEs for-good would be problematic. After all, who would prefer @subdomain.domain.org over @domain.org ? Who needs "www" if you're already set with the protocol itself? It's illogical to assume that use of a root-domainname would be invalid.