Interesting new dns failures

Stephane Bortzmeyer bortzmeyer at nic.fr
Mon May 21 19:15:39 UTC 2007


On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 06:57:06PM +0100,
 Simon Waters <simonw at zynet.net> wrote 
 a message of 53 lines which said:

> PS: Those who make sarcastic comments about people not knowing the
> difference between root servers, and authoritative servers, may need
> to be a tad more explicit for the help of the Internet challenged.

Warning, the rest of this message is only for
Internet-challenged. They are probably uncommon in NANOG. For
instance, I cannot believe that people in NANOG may confuse the ".com"
name servers with the root name servers.

An authoritative name server is an official source of DNS data for a
given domain. For instance, ns2.nic.ve. is authoritative for
".ve". There are typically two to ten or sometimes more authoritative
name servers for a domain. You can display them with "dig NS
the-domain-you-want.".

A root name server is a server which is authoritative for the root of
the DNS. For instance, f.root-servers.net is authoritative for "."
(the root). You can display them with "dig NS ." (for the benefit of
the Internet-challenged, I did not discuss the "alternative" roots).




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