.info root servers responding in authority section, not answer section?

[Kevin Darcy]

No Barry, the response from the nominum.com server is just a referral, the same
thing you'd get if you queried them for e.g. www.declude.info. Technically the
declude.info NS records aren't *in* the .info zone, so it's valid for .info
servers to return a referral. We're just not used to seeing this behavior, because
of the strange way that the regular GTLD servers handle glue records.


- Kevin

Barry Margolin wrote:

> In article <9qqd5f$arf at pub3.rc.vix.com>,
> R. Scott Perry <misclists at declude.com> wrote:
> >Looking up the NS record for declude.info at tld1.nominum.com returns 0
> >answers, and the 2 NS records in the authority section.
> >
> >Are both types of responses correct?  Why the inconsistency?  I checked a
> >few RFCs (1034/1035/2181) and wasn't able to figure out what section covers
> >this.
>
> I'm pretty sure the .info responses are wrong.  RFC 1034 is pretty clear
> that records that match the query go into the Answer section:
>
>          a. If the whole of QNAME is matched, we have found the
>             node.
>             ...
>             Otherwise, copy all RRs which match QTYPE into the
>             answer section and go to step 6.
>
> Nothing in RFC 2181 seems to alter this.
>
> I suspect what's happening is broken duplicate suppression.  RFC 2181 says
> that the same record should not appear in multiple sections, and recent
> versions of BIND automatically put the NS records for the zone in the
> Authority section when replying.  It seems like Nominum's servers notice
> that in this case the NS records are in both the Answer and Authority
> sections, and they mistakenly removed them from the Answer section.  The
> right thing would be to remove them from the Authority section.
>
> I wonder what software they're running on these machines.  Nominum is the
> company that maintains BIND, but these servers don't respond to
> VERSION.BIND queries (I get status=REFUSED).
>
> --
> Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
> Genuity, Woburn, MA
> *** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
> Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.