Glue records (was Re: ATTN GARY KLINE)

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Fri Nov  5 02:26:31 2010
> From: Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown at ru.ac.za>
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 10:27:38 +0200
> Subject: Glue records (was Re: ATTN GARY KLINE)
>
> On Friday 05 November 2010 09:28:27 Ian Smith wrote:
> > But you don't always have any control of what parent nameservers do;
> > eg we do DNS for a .com but both NS are in .au so DNS reports always
> > whinge about lack of glue
>
> They should be whingeing about lack of clue (their own) unless I'm horribly 
> wrong about how DNS works.
>
> When a nameserver delegates a zone, it's not responsible for any of that 
> zone's records any more, with two exceptions. It provides NS records to 
> indicate which nameservers /are/ responsible, and it retains responsibility 
> for the A records of nameservers inside the zone - and only those 
> nameservers. (That's glue.)
>
> There's no way a .com nameserver should be providing A records for hosts in 
> the .au zone.

sure there is.  

   Domain:  foo.com  (an aussie company)
      nameservers   ns1.alicesprings.au, ns2.umelbourneatperth.au

They're still wrong to bw whinging about a lack o glue records.
glue is needed _only_ when the nameserver is _in_ the domain it is the
authoritative servr for.

So, in the above frivolous example, foo.com does *NOT* need any glue
records, but if ns1.alicesprings.au is an authoritative server for 
alicesprings.au, then *it* needs a glue record for that domain.