Domain renawals

Thu Sep 22 16:15:49 UTC 2016

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote:
> On 09/21/2016 01:44 PM, Richard Holbo wrote:
>> FWIW, as I'm in the middle of this right now. It would appear that many of
> What do you think glue records are, and why do you think you need them? :)
> (Those are serious questions, btw)

Glue records are also called "Host  records",  or Alternatively
called: "Nameserver" records.
These are A and AAAA records for your domain name which appear in the
parent TLD zone,
instead of the child zone.

Host records also typically appear in WHOIS, for example:   "$ whois
ns5.yahoo.com"

If you think your registrar does not support them,  then you're
probably having trouble with
your registrar's user interface,  and just don't have the right
procedure,   because the use
of host records is  quite essential and necessary for at least one
domain to self-host DNS......

These records are non-authoritative and belong to the reply delegating
nameservers for
your domain to your servers,  and you need to duplicate a copy of all
your NS, A, AAAA records in your
child zone,  which must be identical to the parent's version of the records.

For example, suppose your domain name is "Example.com"
And you want your nameservers to be  NS1.example.com,
NS2.example.com,  NS3.example.com.

Because the nameservers exist in the same domain name which references them,
the required DNS lookup graph is circular,  and your DNS zone becomes an island!

In order for clients to find your nameserver  to figure out what
NS1.example.com resolves to,
it first needs to be able to find a nameserver for  Example.com,
which is NS1.example.com.

This is what is circular without a Hint in the Additional section of
the DNS reply from the parent nameserver.

The glue record in the parent zone is used to tell the parent TLD
server to include the IP address of
your nameserver in the Additional Section  of the DNS reply,  so you
can  bootstrap DNS resolution
for Example.com.

> Doug
--
-JH