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by Bender 20 days ago
Im not confused at all. For your recursive servers to know how to get the name servers they have to have a hints file, that tells them what to use for the tld, then from the group of root servers associated with that TLD you get the glue (name servers) assocociated with the domain, then you query the authoritative name servers for that domains resources you were requesting. Every name server has a glue record in the root servers. I can manually walk you through it with dig if you would like.

I need to clean up the formatting a bit but this is a walk through. [1] I think I know where your confusion is but I will wait for your reply.

[1] - https://blawg.nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260530-DNS-Recurs...
1 comments
toast0 20 days ago
> from the group of root servers associated with that TLD you get the glue (name servers) assocociated with the domain

Those are not root servers. They are tld servers, run by the registry for the tld your domain is under.

The root servers serve the root. Root hints just tell you where those are. The zone file you listed has the whole root zone.

a.root-servers.net is a root server.

a.gtld-servers.net is a tld server (controlled by verisign, iirc?). several tlds use gtld-servers, but that doesn't make them root servers.

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Bender 20 days ago
TLD servers are just another level of root servers. Each TLD does have a primary registrar that manages them however they provide access to thousands of registrars to manage the glue records at that layer. They are still collectively part of the root servers even if they are not under the domain root-servers.net. My registrar does not manage them. Nobody here is on a regisrar that manages the TLD root servers. The only permission my registrar and most registrars have is to update glue records for the domains their domain clients own and to add their domains. I and every DNS admin I've ever know collectively refers to all levels of the root and TLD servers as root servers. Even if that is technically incorrect that is how we have always referred to them. I think that distinction would primarily mater for people that worked at one of the high level registrars that manages the anycast clusters of tld root servers. At least I think that is where the confusion started. This was fun we should do this again. I updated the blawg to add (TLD) in reference to root servers.
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toast0 20 days ago
If every level is a root, then the word root means nothing. I guess you could say that the root servers point to the tld root servers that point to your domain's root servers. But then root server just means dns server.

I never mentioned registrars, only registries.

> Nobody here is on a regisrar that manages the TLD root servers.

I have a .is domain. For .is and some of the other country code tlds, you contract directly with the entity managing the TLD and its servers.

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Bender 20 days ago
Are you secretly the admin of archive.is? He's made accounts on here before but they were all temporary. I want to believe he has an account that has been here a long time.
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toast0 20 days ago
No, I live on an island, and is is a usps acceptable abbreviation for island ... I was trying to convince my spouse to leave yahoo mail for mail hosted on one of our domains by getting a domain that's less out there than enslaves.us, so I have islandname.is (well not literally that).

Tldr, a cool domain name isn't enough to make a switch happen.

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