From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Feb 1 12:33:43 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 72D2F37B401 for ; Sat, 1 Feb 2003 12:33:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net (pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.161.166]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 62BDA43F3F for ; Sat, 1 Feb 2003 12:33:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com ([172.16.0.95]) by pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id h11KZ1T5070698; Sat, 1 Feb 2003 15:35:02 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Message-ID: <3E3C2EB0.6050801@potentialtech.com> Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 15:31:44 -0500 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20021127 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: aSe@SysFail.com Cc: FreeBSD-Questions Subject: Re: DNS question References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [please wrap you lines at 72 characters or so] aSe wrote: > When a person does a dns lookup to the server and its not already cached, > how does It find out the correct name server to use to find the ip? FreeBSD comes with a list of "root" DNS servers. These are master servers maintained by many different sources that have information on the top level domains. From this list, the DNS can figure out which root server to contact for .com or .net or .whatever. That server then directs your server to the specific DNS server that has the information you are asking for. This is oversimplified. If you have forwarders configured, then the forwarders check their cache first, before consulting the root servers. But the basic method is described there. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message