How to check if Your DNS server is authoritative?

Hello beautiful peoples!

I have configured my own local DNS server. It’s supposed to be recursive and authoritative. What does that even mean?

• Recursive DNS servers are like a phone book that helps you find a phone number. When you type a website address into your browser, your computer contacts a recursive DNS server to find the IP address assigned to that website name. The recursive DNS server doesn’t have a copy of the phone book, but it knows where to find one. It will keep asking other DNS servers until it finds the IP address you’re looking for.

• Authoritative DNS servers are like the phone book company that publishes multiple phone books, one per region. They store the most recent and accurate information (DNS records) for a domain and are able to provide the final answers for users’ DNS queries. When a recursive DNS server needs to find the IP address for a website, it will contact the authoritative DNS server for that domain to get the answer.

When I was configuring my DNS server, my friend BlueB was around and he was giving me advice on how to test it. Since he was being a know-it-all as always I asked him to write a blog entry about it so that in the future this information was easily available to us. To quote somebody that I used to know “Cistern block listens better”. BlueB never wrote the HOW-TO. I needed the info today. Could not find it easily.

Sooo FU BlueB. IF You won’t do it – I will…

To test the “authoritativeness” of the DNS server:

Access the DNS server command line and dig:

dig blog.x220.co.uk

See this entry?

;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) (UDP)

This is a good result.

IF You do not have dig available install dnsutils

sudo apt install -y dnsutils

IF You’re using that different “edgy” *ekhem*ARCHLINUX*ekhem* distro install and use drill instead.

Another method is to visit one of these 2 sites:

https://www.dnsleaktest.com/

This is a good result.

https://ipleak.net/

This is a good result.

I hope this helps!

Catch you on the flip side,

AndrzejL