PowerDNS allows users to place CNAME records in the zone apex

Symptoms

On a cPanel server running PowerDNS, a user may replace the domain's apex A record with a CNAME record or convert the A record to a CNAME record.

; cPanel first:102.0.18 (update_time):1728389782 Cpanel::ZoneFile::VERSION:1.3 hostname:server.hostname.tls latest:122.0.17
; Zone file for domain.tld
$TTL 3600
domain.tld.	86400	IN	SOA	ns1.hostname.tld. admin.hostname.tld. 2024100803 86400 7200 2419200 3600

domain.tld.	86400	IN	NS	ns1.hostname.tld.
domain.tld.	86400	IN	NS	ns2.hostname.tld.
domain.tld.	3600	IN	CNAME	somehost.tld.

Description

CNAME records cannot exist in the zone apex as the zone apex must contain the SOA record (RFC 1034 section 4.2.1) and CNAME records cannot exist at a node with any other record (RFC 1034 section 3.6.2,).

We've opened an internal case for our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is CPANEL-45980. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

None at this time.