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Comment by kgoutham93 | Hacker News Reader

Assume that example.com and foo.example.com have different zone files which in-turn have different ns entries day ns1 and ns2. So if I query for the A record of foo.example.com will it be answered by ns2? If so can I assume that the .com tld server has entries for both example.com and foo.example.com?

So, what are the practical application of zones? I can think of load balancing DNS queries as one.

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> So if I query for the A record of foo.example.com will it be answered by ns2?

Yes, if I understand your example correctly.

> If so can I assume that the .com tld server has entries for both example.com and foo.example.com?

No. The .com zone only contains NS records for example.com. The NS records for foo.example.com exist in the example.com zone (and, for consistency, in the foo.example.com zone), but not in the parent .com zone, which knows nothing about any sub-zones.

Thanks, but where are zones used in practice?

Zones are used to split DNS data into zones of responsibility. I.e. when you want different administrative entities to have control over different sets of names, you put the names in different zones, served by different name servers controlled by those different administrative entities. If a company would split, say, the HQ and research department into separate subdomains "hq.example.com" and "research.example.com", and if they made those two subdomains into separate zones, each department could have their own name servers and each department’s name server administration team could add and delete server host names in their own zone all day long without risking breaking anything for the other department, and without even involving anyone else.

More practically, the "com" and "net" zones are managed by a different company than, say, the zone for "ibm.com", therefore they are in different zones. Also, the root zone (".") and all the country-specific zones like "se" or "de" are certainly managed by different entities (governments), therefore the root zone is separate from those individual country-specific zones.

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