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Sorry, my question is a of 2 parts, I hope that's acceptable here.. Ok here we go

  1. Are there other servers that maintain all domain names for a single TLD (other than the root name servers)? Can I set my BIND server up as one?
  2. Is it possible to query root name servers for all recently created top level domains?

Thanks for taking the time to read this far, and also for the reply you're about to write :)

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1 - Are there other servers that maintain all domain names for a single TLD (other than the root name servers)? Can I set my BIND server up as one?

Any DNS server can host any zone it likes - you can even create your own root (".") zone if you like. However people will only query your server for this information if correct delegation is in place. This is done with NS records. It's common for a large company to create an internal root zone - but this should not be queryable by the outside world.

If you want to hold a copy of the root zone, e.g. if you're behind a firewall and can't directly query upstream nameservers, InterNIC provide a copy here. Note that this is just the root zone, which contains delegation for TLDs like com, net, org, uk; not the data within those zones themselves.

As far as nameservers for the TLDs go, these are all operated by different companies. Possibly not all of them provide a copy of the zones like InterNIC do with the root zone. Zones like com are massive.

2 - Is it possible to query root name servers for all recently created top level domains?

Not using DNS, no. If you want to do that, download root.zone from InterNIC regular and run diff against it. You should also avoid querying the root servers directly, where possible.

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For your first question, that depends on who is maintaining the TLD, but for all of the TLDs we actually care about (.com) it is not possible to set up such an alt-tld-root server. Alt-root, is easier, since the known TLDs are published, but inside a TLD is a much different story. You would have to get a zone transfer from the TLD provider, and that is a business arrangement between you and whomever is running that TLD.

As for the second, I can't answer that one. Someone else will have to do it, though I believe it also depends on the TLD in question. What may be possible for .com, may not be possible for .cats.

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Your question:

1 - Are there other servers that maintain all domain names for a single TLD (other than the root name servers)?

Should really be:

1 - Are there other servers that maintain all domain names for a single gTLD (other than the name servers for that gTLD)?

Because the root name servers (the servers responsible for the . root domain) don't maintain information about any third level domains. They maintain information about the gTLD's and ccTLD's.

The relevant gTLD or ccTLD in turn maintains information for third level domains that fall under that gTLD or ccTLD (.com or .us for instance).

In the following example I used nslookup to query the root servers for my domain (joewebster.com) and then used that answer to query the "next level", and then finally used the authoritative servers for joewebster.com to actually get the answer for the query: joewebster.com

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As you can see, the root server that I queried (first level - a.root-servers.net) only knows which servers are authoritative for the .com gTLD. If it knew which servers were authoritative for my domain it would have returned those servers in it's answer. As it stands, I then had to query one of the gTLD servers for the .com gTLD (second level - c.gtld-servers.net), which in turn answered with the name servers for my domain which are ns1.mydyndns.org and ns2.mydyndns.org. Finally, I queried one of those servers (third level - ns1.mydnydns.org), which provided an answer since it is authoritative for my domain.

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