Do countries have to manage their own domain name servers by themselves

[silvercats]

There are are special doman for countires ,like .in ,.lk,.rus,.us etc....

Is each country responsible for keeping and mantaining their own dns part on their own server?
becasue I heard that for our coountry, domain names are given by our IT university. I don't understand how. I thought that all the domans are managed by a single world server (theoratically) .

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ <<< each country has their own server according to this. how does this work actually?

[rubberman]

Internet address numbers and top-level domains are managed by the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). These domain controllers share their data with each other, and as a new name/number comes on line, that information (routing information, etc) is passed around the internet so that eventually everyone can find it. Your country may have a TLD controller, but not necessarily. You might learn more her: http://www.iana.org/ or here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

[karann1986]

I think it's ICANN...

[silvercats]

so are you telling me that,if it isn't for our dedicated doman server , we will not get any .lk(this is my country's domain) domains? countries who doesn't have their own domain managment services can only have main domains that are managed by IANA or another country?

[JorgeM]

IANA is a department within ICANN, as I understand it. IANA does have a delegation record for the .lk tld. See: http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/lk.html

So when a DNS request is sent to the root servers, according to this link I posted, the resolver (system making the DNS request) would be referred to one of the following DNS name servers hosting the .lk zone:

pendragon.cs.purdue.edu 128.10.2.5
ns1.ac.lk   192.248.1.162, 2001:df0:17:1:0:0:0:162
t.nic.lk    203.94.66.129
m.nic.lk    202.129.235.229
l.nic.lk    192.248.8.17
c.nic.lk    203.143.29.3, 2405:5400:3:1:203:143:29:3
d.nic.lk    123.231.6.18
p.nic.lk    204.61.216.27, 2001:500:14:6027:ad:0:0:1
ripe.nic.lk 193.0.9.88, 2001:67c:e0:0:0:0:0:88

So I think what rubberman was saying is that in some cases, the root DNS servers also host some of the tld zones, while in other cases (as in .lk), the zone is delegated to the name servers listed above.

hope that clarifies it...

[silvercats]

What will happen if the .lk servers go down? (power failiure or somehting)

[JorgeM]

There are at least 9 of them (some of the IPs listed above could be a virtual IP with multiple DNS servers load balanced behind them, so there could be more than 9 physical servers) and these 9 are in different subnets, which I assume at different locations as well, most likely in different parts of the world, or at least a region. You can do a "WhoIs" lookup on these Ips to figure out where they are located.

I one .lk server goes down, its not a problem. The referral to go to .lk will inlcude multiple IPs, so the resolver will try another name server.

[silvercats]

I know it is very unlikely alll the server will go down at once. let's say it does for some reason. what will happen if all went down somehow? no one can access .lk domain any more (unless they directly use IP addresse?) ,or other bad things?