On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 06:57:06PM +0100, Simon Waters <simonw@zynet.net> wrote a message of 53 lines which said:
PS: Those who make sarcastic comments about people not knowing the difference between root servers, and authoritative servers, may need to be a tad more explicit for the help of the Internet challenged.
Warning, the rest of this message is only for Internet-challenged. They are probably uncommon in NANOG. For instance, I cannot believe that people in NANOG may confuse the ".com" name servers with the root name servers. An authoritative name server is an official source of DNS data for a given domain. For instance, ns2.nic.ve. is authoritative for ".ve". There are typically two to ten or sometimes more authoritative name servers for a domain. You can display them with "dig NS the-domain-you-want.". A root name server is a server which is authoritative for the root of the DNS. For instance, f.root-servers.net is authoritative for "." (the root). You can display them with "dig NS ." (for the benefit of the Internet-challenged, I did not discuss the "alternative" roots).