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Reading a book and it states that you should not register nameserver names such as ns1.example.com for the domain example.com as you'll create a catch-22 situation when looking up ns1.example.com etc. I know what a catch-22 is, but I just don't see how this fits in.

At which stage does this occur exactly, when internet central directory queries whois records for that domain to find nameserver ip ?

excerpt from "The difinitive guide to CentOS (APress)"

Caution As you can imagine, telling the world that the primary DNS server for example.org is dns0. example.org has some issues. Mainly, this has you running around in circles because you’ve created a catch-22 situation. You cannot look up dns0.example.org because to do so you need to ask dns0. example.org. Now, as long as you have name servers in another domain, this will still work, but it’s clearly a bad idea. Stay away from this one, and if you have to, use a so-called glue record that defines dns0.example.org in the parent .org zone to solve the issue.

LaserBeak
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  • I find this very odd, what book was it from? The nameservers for `serverfault.com` are `ns1.serverfault.com`, `ns2.serverfault.com` and `ns3.serverfault.com`. That sort of thing is fairly standard practice (Even Google do it). Unless I've miss-understood the question –  Nov 30 '11 at 11:04
  • updated.......... – LaserBeak Nov 30 '11 at 11:09
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    funny book. clearly most of domains are set this way. Glue records is not some cheap _workaround_, that is how DNS designed to work. – Sandman4 Nov 30 '11 at 13:52
  • Btw, it's _NS_ records, have little to do with WHOIS – Sandman4 Nov 30 '11 at 13:53

1 Answers1

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It's simply not true to say that doesn't work, or causes problems. For example, on my main domain:

[madhatta@www tmp]$ whois teaparty.net
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.tucows.com]
[Querying whois.tucows.com]
[whois.tucows.com]
[...]
 Domain servers in listed order:
    NS.TEAPARTY.NET   193.219.118.102
    NS2.TEAPARTY.NET   78.46.204.154
[...]

which works just fine. The technical elements that makes this work are the glue records, which you can read about at the link above, and elsewhere.

MadHatter
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  • I'd go further than that: Not only is it not true to say that it is bad practice, it is a _good_ practice that one _should_ adopt. – JdeBP Jan 19 '12 at 18:05