Removing root zone hints for authoritative nameservers

[Wiley Sanders]

Thanks to all who replied to my query. I'm not going to remove the
root zone hints just yet, they are cached and don't really hurt
performance that much.

What's interesting is that I enabled zone-statistics and I'm having
fun looking at the data. I've found that I am sending "referral
responses" for reverse zones I *am* authoritative for, and for a valid
reason - "classless" reverse delegation. These zones are somewhat
oddly configured, with an NS record assigned to each of the individual
IPs in the class-C. For example:

$ dig 193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa any
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 183
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.     IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa. 1172 IN      NS      ns1.speedhost.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.speedhost.com.      83964   IN      A       66.7.164.200


$ dig +trace 193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa any
[. query deleted, yadda yadda yadda]
[66.in-addr.arpa. query deleted, yadda yadda yadda]

164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.  86400   IN      NS      ns2.yipes.com.
164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.  86400   IN      NS      ns1.yipes.com.
;; Received 88 bytes from 192.5.6.32#53(chia.ARIN.NET) in 86 ms

193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa. 3600 IN      NS      ns1.speedhost.com.
;; Received 74 bytes from 66.7.155.198#53(ns2.yipes.com) in 36 ms

193.164.7.66.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN     PTR     yipesgw.speedhost.com.
164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.  86400   IN      NS      ns2.speedhost.com.
164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.  86400   IN      NS      ns3.speedhost.com.
164.7.66.in-addr.arpa.  86400   IN      NS      ns.speedhost.com.
;; Received 179 bytes from 66.7.164.200#53(ns1.speedhost.com) in 53 ms

Removing the root zone hints wouldn't affect this, I just wanted to
post this to show there was a valid reason for authoritative only
servers to return referral responses.

-Wiley Sanders
  http://wsanders.net