That is a good explanation of the iterative lookup. However, it
is my understanding that the client does not normally perform
this.
Oh, could be.
I always thought it was up to the DNS servers configured on
your system to ultimately perform that role.
It certainly makes sense for dns servers to iteratively query other dns
servers, but
to me it also makes sense that clients would want to. Whether they do
in practice,
I don't know.
To verify, I edited /etc/resolv.conf on a few systems to point
to different nameservers that I knew did not answer recursive
queries from external networks and could not resolve an IP
address that belonged to a third external network. (I tested on
Debian, FreeBSD, Red Hat, and Solaris.)
Well, sounds like you are right then. Interesting...
--Ray
