[anirvana]

Hello everyone,
I am a relative novice with linux, and so would appreciate any help from people on thie following issue .

I am trying to find out who are the DNS servers for a set of IP addresses. Usually when I do ">dig $ip" I can see the DIG options, question section, answer section blah blah...

In the Authority section, I think the root servers for the domain being probed are listed. The thing is is for nearly all the IPs I am looking up the Authority section always comes out to be the same, which bothers me..am I doing something wrong..

e.g. I look up dig 63.241.205.173 and I get,
; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> 63.241.205.173
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 58078
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;63.241.205.173. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
. 10342 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2007040500 1800 900 604800 86400

;; Query time: 45 msec
;; SERVER: 138.23.169.10#53(138.23.169.10)
;; WHEN: Thu Apr 5 10:11:53 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 107

Can I now say that the authoritative DNS server for this ip is a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com ?

For the following set of IPs too I get the same output..which could be OK, but would slightly strange !

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks folks,
-A

[dilbert]

There are some master DNS servers that update all other DNS servers worldwide.

A few years ago, at least, there was a daily update. I don't know if this is still the case.

I believe VeriSign is now the company that charges finally for domain names, so if someone doesn't renew his contract with VeriSign, they delete his domain name from the master DNS server and one day later there is worldwide no name resolution anymore.

[anirvana]

Thanks for the reply . I found out what the problem was:

Don't try to do a dig with an IP , instead provide the domain name...

I was doing something like dig 192.266.37 ....

now when I do dig www.yahoo.com ...no probs..life is good once again