Subject: Should a non-authoritative server put the NS records into Answer or into Authority?

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 15:10:06 +0100

Sorry to use an IETF WG for my training but this question puzzles me for a 
long time and, since we switched one of the nameservers of '.fr' to BIND9, it 
puzzles several of our registrars as well.

When you query a server on data it is not authoritative about (typically a TLD 
server about a subzone, for which it only knows the NS records and some glue), 
where the NS should be when replying? In the Authority section or in the 
Answer one?

Atlas, BIND9 and nsd put the NS records into the Authority section. The Answer 
section is empty (the Perl script of one of our registrars started to crash 
there: "Illegal division by zero" because of the empty section).

BIND8 and PowerDNS put the NS records into the Answer section.

You can check this on ns1.nic.fr (BIND8) vs. ns3.nic.fr (BIND9) or on 
a.root-servers.net (Atlas) vs. k.root-servers.net (nsd).

What is legal? What is best practice?

I'm still confused about what RFC 1034 says:

If recursive service is not requested or is not available, the non-
recursive response will be one of the following:

[...]

   - Some combination of:

     RRs that answer the question, together with an indication
     whether the data comes from a zone or is cached.

     A referral to name servers which have zones which are closer
     ancestors to the name than the server sending the reply.

IMHO, "some combination" without any details mean that all the programs quoted 
above are legally right, although different.

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