On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 05:25:30PM -0700,
Bill Larson wrote
a message of 38 lines which said:

> Now, there is "SRV" records that could be used for this purpose,

Yes, it is the proper solution to the original problem. RFC 2782.

> if anyone ever coded this into a client application.

Do note that you do not need to code everything by yourself, RULI is
here to help:

http://www.nongnu.org/ruli/

RULI stands for Resolver User Layer Interface. It's a library built on top of an asynchronous DNS stub resolver. RULI provides an easy-to-use interface for querying DNS SRV resource records. The goal is to promote wide deployment of SRV-cognizant software. RULI aims to fully support SRV-related standards. There are bindings for PHP, Perl, Guile/Scheme, Java, and Lua. IPv6 is supported.

As side-effect, RULI also provides a general-purpose, event-driven, asynchronous, stub DNS resolver.

RULI is Free Software distributed under the GNU GPL license.