Re: Should a nameserver know about itself?

[bert hubert]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 09:50:26AM +1000, Bruce Campbell wrote:

> Right.  Now that we've gotten that out of the way, can anyone suggest a
> *reliable* test for verifying that a nameserver is responding ( which is
> seperate from verifying that a nameserver is authoritatively serving a
> given zone )

You could send a query for the SOA of the domain, and see if it answers with
the AA flag set:

$ dig ds9a.nl soa @outpost.ds9a.nl

or to check automatically :

$ dig ds9a.nl soa @outpost.ds9a.nl | grep "^\;\; flags" | grep -q " aa "

Another check would be to ask for something in that domain that doesn't
exist, and see if you get an authoritative NXDOMAIN back.

Regards,

bert hubert

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