What is this all about???

[Kevin Darcy]

Well, this is partly a BIND bug and partly just nslookup's suckiness. When receiving an authoritative response to a query, nslookup
normally reports the contents of the Authority Section with "nameserver =" lines. However, it uses *exactly*the*same* output format when
reporting NS records in the Answer Section of the response, and it gives no indication of what section the information comes from. So when
a nameserver reports NS records in the Answer Section, as is common for ANY queries, and the same NS records in the Authority Section, you
get two identically-appearing sets of lines. When the response is non-authoritative, at least nslookup prefaces the Authority Section
output with "Authoritative answers can be found from:", so at least there's a chance of figuring out what it's doing.

The BIND bug consists of the fact that it should not be reporting the same RR more than once in the response, as per RFC 2181, Section 5.5.


- Kevin

Shon Stephens wrote:

> I am using BIND 9.1.1. I have a master and slave server for my domain. When I do nslookup (I know,  everyone wants to use dig). I do:
>
> nslookup
> set type=any
> domain.com
>
> It returns something like this:
> domain.com
>         origin = ns1.domain.com
>         mail addr = hostmaster.domain.com
>         serial = 1
>         refresh = 86400 (1D)
>         retry   = 3600 (1H)
>         expire  = 604800 (1W)
>         minimum ttl = 86400 (1D)
> domain.com        preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.domain.com
> domain.com        nameserver = ns1.domain.com
> domain.com        nameserver = ns2.domain.com
> domain.com        nameserver = ns1.domain.com
> domain.com        nameserver = ns2.domain.com
> mail.domain.com internet address = 10.1.1.172
> ns1.domain.com internet address = 10.1.2.190
> ns2.domain.cominternet address = 10.1.2.191
>
> My db file only contains 2 entries for the NS records. 1 for each of the name servers. Why do I get 4 entries when I perform this query?
>
> Thanks,
> Shon