What happens when you update your DNS
One of my favorite revelations about the network tracing tools (things like `traceroute` and `dig +trace`) that might not be obvious for people like me who work higher up in the stack, is that the data they provide isn't usually made available during "normal" usage. Packets don't just phone home and tell you where they've been. Something else is going on.<p>When you send a DNS query to a recursive server like your ISP's or something like 1.1.1.1, you make a single DNS query and get back a single response, because the recursive DNS server handles all the different queries that Julia outlines in the post. As the client, we have no idea what steps just happened in the background.<p>But when you run `dig +trace`, dig is actually <i>pretending to be a recursive name server</i>, and making all those queries <i>itself</i> instead of letting the real recursive name servers do their work. It's a fun hack but that means it's not always 100% accurate to what's going on in the real world [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://serverfault.com/questions/482913/is-dig-trace-always-accurate" rel="nofollow">https://serverfault.com/questions/482913/is-dig-trace-always...</a>