Drifting OT (was Re: FW: "no data known" vrs "host not found" )

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 09:33:27AM -0500, admjcd wrote:
> The ANY querys only fail from our local DNS servers not from any others on the internet including the ones at army.mil also there are several other domains that return this error intermittently. So is it more of an DNS error on which side? I found this about DNS from:
...

There appears to be the misconception that the ANY query is an ALL
query.  That is, the misconception appears to be that the ANY query
asks the local server to go out and get all the information for the
domain passed and return it.

As I understand it, the ANY query ONLY requests any information that
happens to be lying around.  So, if NONE is lying around, the name
server will go and get ANY information from the domain's name server,
iterating down from as close to the root as necessary.

However, if there happens to be any (ANY) information in the name
server on that domain, it will return it.  If it happens to be just NS
information, then that is what is returned.  If it's just SOA, or just
NS and A, then that is what is returned.

Or just MX.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned in this thread.  If my
mental model of the ANY record is incorrect, I'm sure that I will be
corrected.  ;-)

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at center.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support					EMT-B
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