Authoritative answer

Hello,

For this exam, the MS Press Book mentions four types of answers:

Authoritative answer
Positive answer
Referral answer
Negative answer

I understand how the referral answer and negative work just fine. My question is.. what is the difference between an authoritative and a positive answer?

Thanks for your help

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aquageek

An authoritative answer is a positive answer that has come from the DNS server that has authority over that zone or domain.

A Positive answer comes from a non-authoritative DNS server - such as a caching only server.

(Someone quickly correct me if I'm wrong, please!)

wedge1988

A quote from my revision guide:

An authoritative DNS server for a zone hosts a primary or secondary copy of that DNS zone. DNS servers that are authoritative for a zone should be listed on the Name Servers tab of the Properties sheet for the zone

A Positive answer is an answer that is returned to a querying machine, regardless of weather it is from a Name server of the DNS zone.

@ aquageek, - your right buddy, dont sweat!

Plus,
A Stub Zone can also provide a Positive answer, since it queries the authoritative DNS servers for a response and relays that response, but is not an authoritative DNS server itself.

gravyjoe

Thanks Aguageek and Wedge1988 for the help. That definitely makes sense.

wedge1988

remember that the authoritative dns servers are for the zone they reside in. for example:

DNS 1 is part of acme.com, therefore it cannot be an authoritative dns server for sub.acme.com. so dont add it.

If a scenario states it hosts a primary or secondary zone for sub.acme.com then you can add it as an authoritative dns server for sub.acme.com

simples: sqeak.

HeroPsycho

wedge1988 wrote: »

remember that the authoritative dns servers are for the zone they reside in. for example:

DNS 1 is part of acme.com, therefore it cannot be an authoritative dns server for sub.acme.com. so dont add it.

If a scenario states it hosts a primary or secondary zone for sub.acme.com then you can add it as an authoritative dns server for sub.acme.com

simples: sqeak.

That's confusing. The bottom line is if the DNS server has the record but not via cache, it provides authoritative responses. It's irrelevant what domain a computer is in; it can have zones for domains it's not a member of. In fact, domain membership has absolutely nothing necessarily to do with what zones a DNS server will host, although granted AD integrated zones may influence that to some degree, but you don't have to use AD integrated zones.

For example, a server hosting a stub zone of domain.com will provide authoritative responses for SOA and NS records for domain.com, but non-authoritative responses for everything else because it doesn't store those other records (A, MX, SRV, CNAME, TXT, etc.) other than via cache.