bad horizontal referral ?

[Kevin Darcy]

Jean-François Leroux wrote:
> Hi,
> doing a trace with dig today I got a 'BAD (HORIZONTAL) REFERRAL'
> message, with the correct answer though.
>  What does this mean ?
>
>
>   
Referrals should be "down" not "across". If you're resolving www.foo.com 
iteratively and along the way a delegated nameserver for foo.com refers 
you to blah.com, that's a useless referral because it doesn't get you 
any closer to resolving the name.

Dig probably got the correct answer because it gave up on the broken 
nameserver and tried a different one.

                                                                         
            - Kevin