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Comment by unfletch | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a lot about DNS, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a case where the TLD does have an A record:

    dk.       86400	IN	A	193.163.102.24

In fact, www.dk resolves to a different IP:

    www.dk.   86400	IN	A	212.242.42.44

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You're right -- dk. has an A record. It's coming from the dk name servers, though, not from the root zone. (I should have run the query the first time.) You're also absolutely correct that dk and www.dk resolve to different IP addresses. So the root name servers are returning a redirect to the dk name servers, which are providing an A record. (You can see it with "dig +trace dk.") The dk name servers can return whatever they want. I believe the behavior is undefined, though -- where a zone and a parent zone have records in common, they should be consistent. So you may get different behavior from different resolver implementations. (This may help to explain why some people see something at http://dk and some don't.)

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