Google DNS --- Figuring out which DNS Cluster you are using

Thu Aug 24 07:42:42 UTC 2017

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 10:53:58AM +1000,
 Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote 
 a message of 39 lines which said:

> If Google was being sensible the servers would just return the
> information along with the answer.  They all support EDNS.

I fully agree with you that NSID (RFC 5001) is great and Google should
really deploy it. However:

> e.g. dig +nsid @8.8.8.8

I assume that Google wants also to be debuggable by people who work on
inferior operating systems, and have no dig. Hence this trick. For
instance, L.root-servers.net has both NSID and a special name,
identity.l.root-servers.org (see RFC 7108).