http://bi/ It works! What kind of domain name is this?

Question

I just mistyped a URL and the browser displayed a page saying "It works!"

How does DNS resolve these names? What are they?

~> curl http://bi/
<html><body><h1>It works!</h1></body></html>


~> nslookup bi

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   bi
Address: 196.2.8.205

Is this question about DNS in general, or a specific library resolver? If it is the former, it's probably not a good fit for SO. — Tim Post, Jul 04 '11 at 19:32

Drazisil · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-04T16:23:32.797

4

It's not normally done, but it looks like the bi NIC entered a domain record for the TLD itself. When you do a PTR (Reverse DNS) record search on that IP you get the following:

Non-authoritative answer:
205.8.2.196.in-addr.arpa    name = ns.nic.bi.

Normally TLD (Top-level domains) should now have A records attached to them.

The DNS records for bi are as follows:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;bi.                IN  ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
bi.         38400   IN  TXT "Check the website http://www.nic.bi"
bi.         38400   IN  TXT "Top-level Domain of the Republic of Burundi"
bi.         38400   IN  TXT "NIC Burundi"
bi.         38400   IN  TXT "Top-level Domain of .bi"
bi.         38400   IN  A   196.2.8.205
bi.         38400   IN  SOA ns.nic.bi. registrar.nic.bi. 2011070201 21600 3600

edited Jul 04 '11 at 16:23

answered Jul 04 '11 at 16:16

Drazisil

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Please don't link to scraper sites. Original on Serverfault: http://serverfault.com/questions/154991/why-do-some-tld-have-an-mx-record-on-the-zone-root-e-g-ai – Thilo Jul 04 '11 at 23:57
@ Thilo Sorry, didn't know. Thanks for the original link. – Drazisil Jul 05 '11 at 00:50

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 30 '11 at 00:37

3

A domain name is made up of one or more parts separated by dots. The name bi has only one part, and therefore does not need any dots.

Domain names may have an A (Address) record associated with them. It looks like bi does, but for example uk does not.

answered Jun 30 '11 at 00:37

Greg Hewgill

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 30 '11 at 00:32

2

It's the top level code for Burundi. It is the same site as www.bi.

answered Jun 30 '11 at 00:32

Brian Carlton

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It's not *necessarily* the same as `www.bi`, and could refer to a completely different site. – Greg Hewgill Jun 30 '11 at 00:35
True, but in this case it is the same data. Or was, in the Google cache. – Brian Carlton Jun 30 '11 at 00:36
Are they supposed to do this? `http://de/` does not work, for example. – Thilo Jun 30 '11 at 00:36

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 04 '11 at 19:10

Once upon a time, in an arpanet far away, Mockapetris wrote the initial specification for DNS. As written, absolute names ended with ., and relative names did not.

Well, that idea lasted about 25 seconds in the face of actual human beings typing in names. Instead, unqualified names are relative -- unless they happen to be tlds. In which case they aren't.

http://bi/ It works! What kind of domain name is this?

4 Answers4