[96683] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Interesting new dns failures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephane Bortzmeyer)
Mon May 21 15:18:02 2007
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 21:15:39 +0200
From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>
To: Simon Waters <simonw@zynet.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200705211857.07458.simonw@zynet.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 06:57:06PM +0100,
Simon Waters <simonw@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).
