authoritative name server vs recursive name server

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An authoritative name server provides actual answer to your DNS queries such as – mail server IP address or web site IP address (A resource record). It provides original and definitive answers to DNS queries. It does not provides just cached answers that were obtained from another name server. Therefore it only returns answers to queries about domain names that are installed in its configuration system.

In other words, an authoritative name server lets recursive name servers know what DNS data (the IPv4 IP, the IPv6 IP, a list of incoming mail servers, etc.) a given host name (such as “www.example.com”) has. As just one example, the authoritative name server for “example.com” tells recursive name servers that “www.example.com” has the IPv4 IP address 192.0.43.10.

authoritative name server简而言之就是直接能给出你query答案的server，如果你请求www.example.com的ip，authoritative name server可以给你直接返回所对应的公网ip。而recursive name server就是它本身不知道如何回答query，所以需要把query发送给其他name server去解析。

举个例子，
例如在我的小区网络上有个name server，其中配置了example.com的A record，这样这个name server就是example.com的authoritative name server。如果小区网络中有人要访问example.com，他们会去这个name server中查询example.com的ip，显然马上就会回复对应的ip地址，这个回复是一个authoritative response。
但是如果有人要访问foo.com，这时候因为小区中的name server中并没有foo.com的A记录，不是foo.com的authoritative name server。所以小区中的name server首先会把这个query发送给外部的其他name server，如果该name server依然不是authoritative，则会继续做同样的事情，直到找到foo.com的authoritative name server。