owner {ttl} addr-class RP mbox-domain-name TXT-domain-name
franklin IN RP ben.franklin.berkeley.edu. sysadmins.berkeley.edu.
The Responsible Person record, RP, identifies the name or group name of the responsible person for a host. Often it is desirable to be able to identify the responsible entity for a particular host. When that host is down or malfunctioning, you would want to contact those parties who might be able to repair the host.
The first field, mbox-domain-name, is a domain name that specifies the mailbox for the responsible person. Its format in a zone file uses the DNS convention for mailbox encoding, identical to that used for the Person-in-charge mailbox field in the SOA record. In the example above, the mbox-domain-name shows the encoding for ``<ben@franklin.berkeley.edu>''. The root domain name (just ``.'') may be specified to indicate that no mailbox is available.
The second field, TXT-domain-name, is a domain name for which TXT records exist. A subsequent query can be performed to retrieve the associated TXT resource records at TXT-domain-name. This provides a level of indirection so that the entity can be referred to from multiple places in the DNS. The root domain name (just ``.'') may be specified for TXT-domain-name to indicate that no associated TXT RR exists. In the example above, ``sysadmins.berkeley.edu.'' is the name of a TXT record that might contain some text with names and phone numbers.
The format of the RP record is class-insensitive. Multiple RP records at a single name may be present in the database, though they should have identical TTLs.
The RP record is still experimental; not all name servers implement or recognize it.