finding authoritative nameservers

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

This question has probably been asked and answered a zillion times
already, but I hope I will be forgiven for feeling less-then-eager
about searching through that past 20 years worth of bind-users list
archives for the answer.

I'd just like to know if there is any "sure fire" (or mostly sure fire)
way of getting a list of the real, true, and actual authoritative name
servers for one or both of:

   (*)  A fully-qualified domain name, which is believed to be
	associated with at least one A record, or...

   (*)  some proper sort of ...in-addr.arpa name that is believed to
	be associated with at least one PTR record.

I've tried all sorts of things, in my abundant ignorance, and nothing
seems to work entirely reliably 100% of the time.  (Maybe its just
an impossible goal?)

I've written code (both Perl and C) to perform simple querying for the
applicable A and PTR records, and then tried to fish out the right-hand-
sides of all of the type NS AUTHORITY records contained in the responses,
but this often gives what, in the context of what I want to do, are "wrong"
results.  (I am presuming that this is probably because some name server
_other than_ one of the authoritative ones cached an answer and is helpfully
giving that to me, along with its own identity in the AUTHORITY section,
yes?  If I have misunderstood the situation entirely, then please do
straighten me out.)

To get a list of the _actually authoritative_ name servers corresponding
to a given A or PTR record, I have also tried the approach of querying
first for some obscure type of record (e.g. MG and/or ISDN) that isn't
used a lot... and that thus is highly unlikely to be in anybody's cache...
and _then_ performing an ANY query for the FQDN or the ...in-addr.arpa
name, and _then_ looking at the AUTHORITY section of the response to that
second query, and this approach does seem to produce the true and correct
list of authoritative nameserver names that I want about 99.99% of the time.
But there are still rare occasional ``glitches'', i.e.  cases where the
AUTHORITY section of the response to the second query mentions one or more
of the *.gtld-servers.net nameservers (for FQDNs) or else where the AUTHORITY
section of the response to the second query mentions one or more of the
*.arin.net nameservers (for ...in-addr.arpa names) and these AUTHORITY RRs
are quite definitely NOT what I want, because they are _not_ telling me
names of any of the actually authoritative nameservers for the FQDNs or IP
addresses that I want information about.

Footnote:

Before anybody begins to beat me (verbally) about the head and neck for my
failure to adequately RTFM, let me just say that I _did_ try to read up on
topic of AUTHORITY sections (in RFC 1035) before posting here, but alas,
both RFC 1035 and Cricket Liu's book were rather entirely uninformative
about AUTHORITY sections generally, so I'm still ignorant about what these
sections are even _supposed_ to contain, even when everything is going right...
which, as we all know, on the Internet things don't always.

Thanks in adance for any enlightenment/assistance.