[dns-operations] dotless domains

[Fred Morris]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2012, Edward Lewis wrote:
> In Safari, http://dk./ "worked" while http://dk/ didn't.

Yes. I was going to point that out: the rightmost dot. Traditionally
without the rightmost dot is a "resource" or "relative" (or whatever you
want to call it) and the rightmost dot makes it a /fully/ qualified domain
name. (This concept should be familiar to anyone who's edited a zonefile,
although ironically it's not easy to find an RFC which defines the FQDN.)

The laziness is in how we all talk about "root" name servers: I never hear
anybody say "dot" name servers. (1034 refers to the 'root "."')

Or stating it another way:

demeter:~ demeter$ dig . ns

; <<>> DiG 9.6-ESV-R4-P3 <<>> . ns
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22941
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 13, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 13

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;.				IN	NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
.			283	IN	NS	d.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	m.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	h.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	g.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	l.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	b.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	i.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	f.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	j.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	e.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	c.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	a.root-servers.net.
.			283	IN	NS	k.root-servers.net.

I don't see "root" in there anywhere. What I see is ".".

http://www.google.com./ works fine for me. ;-)

--

Fred Morris