What this site is

The name comes from tinydns, the authoritative server in D. J. Bernstein’s djbdns, released in 1999 and placed in the public domain in 2007. It answered from a single prebuilt constant database file and refused to do recursion in the same process, which remains the clearest illustration of why the two jobs are kept apart. That design is discussed here as documented history.

The rest is the working material: what a resolver does between the root and an answer, why there are thirteen root addresses and several hundred machines answering on them, what each record type is genuinely for, how a TTL decides what a cache will still be serving after you have changed something, and the four failures behind most real outages. Then the field as it stands: BIND, NSD, Knot, Unbound, PowerDNS, and what DNSSEC does and does not solve.

tinydns.org is not connected to the djbdns project or its author. Nothing here is distributed, maintained or endorsed by that project, and no software, configuration or zone data is offered for download.