The "bailiwick" of content DNS servers.

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People keep talking about the "bailiwick" of content DNS servers. What is this ?

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The bailiwick of a content DNS server is quite a simple notion. It is the domain that was used in the referral that directed a resolving proxy DNS server to that content DNS server in the first place. When a superdomain's content DNS servers issue a referral saying "Ask those servers over there about that particular domain.", then the domain in the referral is the bailiwick of the content DNS servers when they come to be queried.

For example, if the "net." content DNS servers respond to an enquiry for the name "an.example.net." with a referral to content DNS servers at 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 for the domain "example.net.", then the bailiwick of the latter servers, when they come to be queried, is "example.net.".

Bailiwick is the scope of authority of any particular content DNS server, determined by following a chain of referrals from the root of the DNS namespace. A content DNS server may only be trusted where the information it provides is about names within its own bailiwick.

There are two important precepts to remember about content DNS server bailiwick:


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