Subject: Two levels of gluelessness

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 8 Dec 1999 22:41:25 -0000

Let's say you want to look up the address of freeserve.co.uk. You have
co.uk NS ns1.nic.uk A 195.66.240.130 in your cache.

You send freeserve.co.uk A? to 195.66.240.130. The response:

   freeserve.co.uk NS pridns1.svr.pol.co.uk
   freeserve.co.uk NS pridns2.svr.pol.co.uk
   freeserve.co.uk NS pridns3.svr.pol.co.uk
   freeserve.co.uk NS pridns4.svr.pol.co.uk

So you send pridns1.svr.pol.co.uk A? to 195.66.240.130. The response:

   pol.co.uk NS venus.theplanet.net
   pol.co.uk NS pluto.theplanet.net
   pol.co.uk NS earth.theplanet.net

So you send venus.theplanet.net A? to the roots. Finally you get the
address of venus.theplanet.net, which knows pridns1.svr.pol.co.uk, which
knows freeserve.co.uk.

I still haven't seen any examples of three levels of gluelessness. But
overall Internet gluelessness is sure to increase with the new TLDs.

---Dan