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DNS Basic Name Resolution Techniques: Iterative and Recursive Resolution (Page 4 of 4) Contrasting Iterative and Recursive Resolution To help explain the difference between these methods, let's take a side-trip to a real-world case. Suppose you are trying to find the phone number of your old friend Carol, with whom you haven't spoken in years. You call your friend Joe; he doesn't have Carol's number, but he gives you John's number, suggesting you call him. So you dial up John; he doesn't have the information but he knows the number of Carol's best friend, Debbie, and gives that to you. You call Debbie and she gives you Carol's information. This is an example of an iterative process. In contrast, suppose you called Joe and Joe said I don't know, but I think I know how to find out . He called John and then Debbie and called you back with the phone number. That would be like recursive resolution. So in essence, iteration is doing the job yourself, while recursion is passing the buck. You might think that everyone would always want to use recursion since it makes the other guy do the work. This is true, but passing the buck is not considered good form if it is not done with permission. Not all name servers support recursion, especially servers near the top of the hierarchy. Obviously, we don't want to bog down the root name servers and the ones that handle .COM and other critical TLDs with doing recursion. It is for this reason that clients must request that name servers perform recursion for them. One place where recursion is often used is with the local name server on a network. Rather than making client machine resolvers perform iterative resolution, it is common for the resolver to generate a recursive request to the local DNS server, which then generates iterative requests to other servers as needed. As you can see, recursive and iterative requests can be combined in a single resolution, providing significant flexibility to the process as a whole. This is demonstrated in a more realistic example in the topic detailing the DNS name resolution process. Again, remember that for the purpose of understanding resolution, a DNS server can in fact act as a client. As soon as a DNS server accepts a recursive request for resolution on a name it cannot resolve itself, it becomes a client in the process. I should also point out that it is common for resolvers to know the names of not one but two local DNS servers, so if a problem occurs reaching the first they can try the second.
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