[dns-operations] All NSs for a TLD being in the TLD itself

[Chris Thompson]

On Oct 24 2013, Paul Hoffman wrote:

>The new records for one of the shiny new gTLDs are:
>
>xn--ngbc5azd.		172800	IN	NS	a.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.
>xn--ngbc5azd.		172800	IN	NS	b.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.
>xn--ngbc5azd.		172800	IN	NS	c.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.
>xn--ngbc5azd.		172800	IN	NS	d.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.
>a.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	A	37.209.192.3
>a.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	AAAA	2001:dcd:1:0:0:0:0:3
>b.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	A	37.209.194.3
>b.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	AAAA	2001:dcd:2:0:0:0:0:3
>c.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	A	37.209.196.3
>c.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	AAAA	2001:dcd:3:0:0:0:0:3
>d.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	A	37.209.198.3
>d.nic.xn--ngbc5azd.	172800	IN	AAAA	2001:dcd:4:0:0:0:0:3
>
>This works, of course, but it feels a bit fragile for me. Is there a history
>of this being unsafe? Of being more safe than NSs whose names are in other TLDs?

Whatever the safety aspects (there are probably arguments both ways) it
certainly isn't uncommon. Going by the delegation NS records, 57 out of
323 TLDs have all NS records inside themselves. These include 51 ISO3166
ccTLDs, 5 ASCII gTLDs (biz, mil, net, tel, travel) and [now!] just one
IDN gTLD (the above).

-- 
Chris Thompson               University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Email: cet1 at ucs.cam.ac.uk    Roger Needham Building, 7 JJ Thomson Avenue,
Phone: +44 1223 334715       Cambridge CB3 0RB, United Kingdom.