Dig not returning authority section?

Solution 1:

You can not get authority section if you don't query on authoritative servers.

For example authoritative servers for the google.com are;

dig @l.gtld-servers.net google.com

Result will include these lines;

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com.     172800  IN  NS  ns2.google.com.
google.com.     172800  IN  NS  ns1.google.com.
google.com.     172800  IN  NS  ns3.google.com.
google.com.     172800  IN  NS  ns4.google.com.

Solution 2:

Hmmm. Not too sure if it is a flag issue, but why not do this; SOA means “Start Of Authority”:

dig SOA wikipedia.com

My results:

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> SOA wikipedia.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20716
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;wikipedia.com.         IN  SOA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
wikipedia.com.      86400   IN  SOA ns0.wikimedia.org. hostmaster.wikimedia.org. 2012060714 43200 7200 1209600 3600

;; Query time: 321 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Sun Jan 27 22:25:21 2013
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 95

Solution 3:

This has been driving me crazy on my macbook too. So I dug a little deeper. Not sure what exactly happened to all DNS servers, but a majority of them do not return 'authority' section anymore. Even with +authority flag. And neither for +additional.

But I knew webdig still worked for some. So tried webdig.

http://digwebinterface.com/?hostnames=google.com&type=&showcommand=on&colorize=on&useresolver=8.8.4.4&ns=all&nameservers=

I have saved the results on my pc to prove I am not crazy. But you can see yourself, that only a few DNS servers return the authority section at the moment.

dig xxxxxxx.xx NS still works and gets you the name servers in answers section. But no more authority section.

If you confirm the same, that would tell me I am not dreaming this. Ashish

Solution 4:

Not sure what exactly happened to all DNS servers

I assume they changed bind from version 9.11 to 9.12
Somewhere the option "minimal-responses" changed from default "no" to "yes". If you define

minimal-responses no ;

in the options section it will work as before.