resolving the ip address for the root servers

[Ragnar Paulson]

Hi all,  I've just spent the better part of the day trying to debug this
and reading newsgroups to no avail.  We are running Bind 8.2.2-P3 on
RedHat Linux. Everything appears to be working fine but it appears that
we are going to the root servers to resolve the address of the root
servers!   Our root.cache file must be working,
seeing as Bind knows the address of the root servers, but nslookup
a.root-servers.net generates traffic instead of resolving locally.  This
becomes apparent when the connection to the internet is down, because
then
nslookup a.root-servers.net fails.   Why is this.

This is the named.conf entry:

zone "." in {
        type hint;
        file "root.cache";
};

And the file root.cache is:

.                       999999  IN      NS      A.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      B.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      C.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      D.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      E.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      F.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      G.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      H.root-servers.net.
                        999999  IN      NS      I.root-servers.net.
A.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       198.41.0.4
B.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       128.9.0.107
C.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       192.33.4.12
D.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       128.8.10.90
E.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       192.203.230.10
F.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       129.5.5.241
G.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       192.112.36.4
H.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       128.63.2.53
I.root-servers.net.     999999  IN      A       192.36.148.17

Can anyone explain this?  Thanks in advance.

--
Ragnar Paulson    ragnar at thesoftwaregroup.on.ca
The Software Group Limited  705 725 9999

"Of course I don't believe in it.  But I understand that it brings you
luck whether you believe in it or not."

-- Nuclear physicist Niels Bohr explaining why he had hung a horseshoe
on the wall.