Editing Root name server (section)

==Resolver operation==
When a computer on the Internet needs to resolve a domain name, it uses [[Domain_Name_System#DNS_resolvers|resolver]] software to perform the lookup. A resolver breaks the name up into its labels from right to left. The first component (TLD) is queried using a root server to obtain the responsible authoritative server. Queries for each label return more specific name servers until a name server returns the answer of the original query.

In practice, most of this information does not change very often over a period of hours and therefore it is [[Cache (computing)|cached]] by intermediate name servers or by a name cache built into the user's application. DNS lookups to the root name servers may therefore be relatively infrequent. A survey in 2003 reported that only 2% of all queries to the root servers were legitimate. Incorrect or non-existent caching was responsible for 75% of the queries, 12.5% were for unknown TLDs, 7% were for lookups using IP addresses as if they were domain names, etc.<ref>{{cite web
|author=Duane Wessels |author2=Marina Fomenkov
|title=Wow, That's a Lot of Packets
|year=2003
|url=http://dns.measurement-factory.com/writings/wessels-pam2003-paper.pdf
|access-date = 7 November 2013}}</ref> Some misconfigured desktop computers even tried to update the root server records for the TLDs. A similar list of observed problems and recommended fixes has been published in RFC 4697.

Although any local implementation of DNS can implement its own private root name servers, the term "root name server" is generally used to describe the thirteen well-known root name servers that implement the root name space domain for the Internet's official global implementation of the Domain Name System. Resolvers use a small 3 [[Kilobyte|KB]] ''root.hints'' file published by Internic<ref name="root_dataset" /> to bootstrap this initial list of root server addresses; in other words, root.hints is necessary to break the [[circular dependency]] of needing to know the addresses of a root name server to lookup the same address.