Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down

Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don't see that as a user. Also it's a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.

Because its always DNS

Because it's the least-likely position to be staffed by a company. It's the "least important" person to have.... until it breaks. Often a company relies on routing-switching engineers to do DNS instead of hiring a dedicated DDI engineer (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). It saves money in the short term, but when shit hits the fan... no one knows how to fix it because DNS is really easy until it's not. DNS is super simple at a basic level. But it goes way deeper than most people realize.

Also, if you're genuinely interested in this field, first you should enter the world of enterprise network engineering. Get Security +, CCNA, and PCNSA. With those certs in hand (and knowledge in your brain), apply to jobs as a network support engineer. Do the work for a few years. Learn BIND. Learn Infoblox. Focus on learning DHCP and subnetting. Learn DNSSEC & IPv6. Experiment with a Pi Hole. Set up a home lab. Apply to jobs with DNS. Start living the good life. This takes about 10 years if you learn fast and are good at interviews.

Ah, thanks for the info! I have no idea how Lemmy stuff works. I only became aware of Lemmy last month.

Friday I was doing a zone transfer! What are the odds?

A zone transfer is like moving houses, except for an authoritative zone.

In DNS, we have what's called an authoritative zone. That means the device hosting the "resource records" (all the data that DNS passes around) is the "ultimate" answer. I.e, it's not cached data. It's not a hosts file. It's not a recursive answer. It's the real deal.

When you want to move the authoritative zone to another server, you do a "zone transfer" that means the new server will copy all the resource records over TCP from current authoritative zone. The reason you may want to do this instead of manually hand-jamming it is that many large organizations have, sometimes, hundreds of resource records (last month I coordinated a zone transfer that was over 1000 records!).

1. Yes. Unless there's some kind of crazy domain-level hi-jinks involved with Lemmy (I am not versed in Lemmy), pointing directly to the IP will work if you bypass it by spoofing your DNS (Hosts file, for example).
2. I don't know how Lemmy federation works, sorry :(
3. See #2

Sorry that I couldn't answer more of your questions.

There are several problem with this including total lack of SSL without the proper cert for that other domain, also Lemmy.ml's IP seems to be running a reverse proxy so the internal IP that we would want to connect to is not visible to the world this is common for web security, the owners must set allowed domains and ports in their config file.

If none of that was a problem Lemmy itself does not do well with changing domains, as highlighted here: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200

An alternative DNS root is where someone other than IANA sets up a root zone. At the end of the day, root zone authority is technically not "hard coded". It's a terrible idea to set up an alt root or to use one for these reasons:

1. Security. This is the biggest one. DNSSEC works via setting up Trust Anchors with the root zone and chaining down the tree all the way to the recursive DNS server. DNSSEC doesn't work if anyone in there doesn't have a trust anchor for the root zone. Additionally, if that root zone is untrustworthy, you can effectively have DNS poisoning happen at the root level. Imagine having two google.com's based on which root zone (and therefore walking two separate trees) you ask.
2. It encourages dividing the internet. The two largest Alt zones are Russia's (RNDNS) and China's (.chn). RNDNS exists as a continuity plan in case the rest of the world decides to cut them off of the internet. China's is part of a hare-brained plan to "reinvent the internet under IPv9" (an idiotic plan that sounds even more crazy than Iran's supposed "quantum computer")
3. Pointing to a different root zone can cause a lot of headaches for diagnosing DNS issues when they aren't coming down from the same root zone. It can cause different answers (and a parallel tree).

To answer your second question, they are not good for acting as a way to mitigate DNS failures. No domain servers are going to be asking them in the first place, meaning no one can get there even if it does have the "correct" answer. If all 13 root servers went down simultaneously, the results would be catastrophic. But that's also why they're physically located around the world in many different countries in heavily secure facilities with many High-Availability servers (clone servers that instantly take over if there's a failure, the ultimate "hot" server)

You wouldn't want to have a DNS server ask two root zones anyway. If it can't reach the root zones, then that needs to be addressed. You can't just ask a "less secure" server in case the primary doesn't work. That's just begging for a security breach via cutting off access to the primary root zones so that they "fail over" to the less secure ones.

I can answer this. The organization that says mali owns .ml gives the ownership country a lot of sway.

So if the country of mali were to reach out formally to the organization and say "hey this domain violates our laws" they would take that very seriously and then work with the registrar & authoritative nameserver owner to handle the situation.

I'm sure this isn't 100% accurate but 90-95 based on my work in a web hosting company

The ".com" and ".org" and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.

Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got "ml" for example but Tuvalu got "tv". (Yes, technically ".tv" has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where ".sport" or ".dentist" come from.

Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want "greatgatsby.com" you have to talk to the ".com" owners. If you want "greatgatsby.sport" you talk to the ".sport" owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.

So anyways now you own a domain like "greatgatsby.sport", what do you want to host? Mail at "mail.greatgatsby.sport"? A website at world wide web aka "www.greatgatsby.sport"? Up to you.

Over time, largely by convention "www" became where you put your website.

From there you have two options, you can setup a redirect from "http://greatgatsby.sport" to "http://www.greatgatsby.sport" or you can do a little hosting "trick" and just make "http://greatgatsby.sport" return your website.

To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:

1. Your web browser automatically checks the A record "www" if "cakefarts.com" doesn't have an A record. A records are the records in a DNS server that says "this domain goes here"
2. The site cakefarts.com put their website on cakefarts.com and placed a CNAME record called "www" that points to cakefarts.com
3. cakefarts.com has an APEX record that points to www.cakefarts.com

For the 'record', www is just a really common record name. There's nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It's up to the domain owner.

They paid a huge amount of money to get a TLD

Companies don't/can't sell TLD's. Only IANA can decide those. When the internet first started, .org, .net, .com etc. were handed out to non-profit organizations and the costs were purely to keep the servers running. Eventually though, when IANA decided to hand out country codes like .io (Indian Ocean), .cat (Catalonia) or .tv (Tuvalu), those countries rent their "desirable" names to private organizations that sell domain registrations for lots of money. In 2013, IANA decided to enact the gTLD auctions to help raise more money. Basically, if you wanted to (and had a lot of money & DNS engineers on staff), you could register any TLD you want provided you were willing to make a large donation to IANA. If someone else wanted it, they had to go into an action war over it. That's how we ended up with things like .party or .sport or .world cough Now-a-days, if you want a TLD, you'd have to convince IANA to give you one.... But good luck with that. They won't give you one unless you're some major corporation that can actually handle it. They also just don't give them out. Usually it's only when they really feel like more TLD's are needed. It's a very serious responsibility and mismanagement could accidentally DDOS a DNS root zone & impact the internet.

So here's the thing about TLD's, ownership of them is determined by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). They're basically my career's gods. If they tell me to jump, I ask "how high". They control the DNS root zone. Effectively, that's the actual top-level of ALL domains. If they decide to remove a TLD or reassign it, all you can do is lodge a complaint straight to their shredder. They're owned and operated by ICANN, a non-profit organization.

Back in 2013, Mali allowed a private Netherlands company to "manage" (rent) their TLD, .ML Recently, that company (Freenom) got sued by Meta. Even though I don't really like Meta, as a network engineer, I don't like Freenom even more. They turn a blind eye to bad actors on the internet, refuse to investigate hackers/scammers/DDOSers, and generally refuse to play ball. They are a huge pain in the ass. Due to the lawsuit, IANA reassigned ML to Mali since they asked for it. At the end of the day you "cant" sell a country-level TLD. Mali was renting it to Freenom under the table. This happens a lot and IANA usually just looks the other way. .io for example is the freakin' Indian Ocean.

So yeah, Mali didn't "snatch" it. They just asked IANA to reassign it and there isn't shit Freenom can do about it since they never "really" owned it in the first place.

They don't know unless the DNS server tells them. For example, a very popular webhost Akamai uses a complex DNS + web hosting suite (DNS edgesuit to be exact) to send that type of data to the web servers. It can also allow for many many other features.