Troubles with bind resolving zip4.usps.com

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 09:33:29PM -0400,
 Joseph S D Yao <jsdy at center.osis.gov> wrote 
 a message of 50 lines which said:

> Note that the NS records are in the AUTHORITY section, and there is
> no ANSWER section!

This is perfectly normal, since the queried server is not
authoritative for the domain.

> I can't quite think how one could misconfigure BIND to do this, but
> it may not be a BIND name server.

It is not a misconfiguration and 56.0.82.25 is indeed a BIND 9.

Same case with one of the ".fr" name servers (not a BIND, but it
changes nothing, you can try with ns3.nic.fr which is BIND):

% dig @ns2.nic.fr A www.foobar.fr

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> @ns2.nic.fr A www.foobar.fr
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63216
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.foobar.fr.                 IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
foobar.fr.              345600  IN      NS      nshost1.st2.lyceu.net.
foobar.fr.              345600  IN      NS      nshost2.st2.lyceu.net.
foobar.fr.              345600  IN      NS      nshost3.st2.lyceu.net.

;; Query time: 20 msec
;; SERVER: 2001:660:3005:1::1:2#53(ns2.nic.fr)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug  4 10:29:51 2005
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 110