On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, John Neiberger wrote:

Thanks to everyone who helped me out and I hope you don't mind me making a fool of myself. :-) I (and others that I work with) learned quite a lot from your responses to this little incident. If I have to be a little bit foolish to learn something valuable, then so be it! <g>

If you have a copy of "DNS and BIND" laying around the office somewhere, grab it and read the first two or three chapters. They do an excellent job of describing how the distributed domain name system works. This would be good background knowledge for anyone in the business at this level, and it should only take you 30 minutes (or so) to read. The one difference between what older versions of the book describe and current reality is that the root servers, [a-m].root-servers.net, are no longer authoritative for most of the gTLD zones. They have moved to [a-m].gtld-servers.net. For those who would like to see a reader's digest version of how the delegation chain works, try the following: dig @a.root-servers.net. com. ns dig @a.gtld-servers.net. yahoo.com. ns dig @ns1.yahoo.com. www.yahoo.com. ns dig @za.akadns.net. www.yahoo.akadns.net. a That's roughly the path that a resolver would take to figure out how to deal with you typing "www.yahoo.com" into your browser. Doug -- "We have known freedom's price. We have shown freedom's power. And in this great conflict, ... we will see freedom's victory." - George W. Bush, President of the United States State of the Union, January 28, 2002 Do YOU Yahoo!?