root is the name of a database record of the root zone in the Domain Name System of the Internet that was occasionally used as a diagnostic marker. Its presence demonstrated the root zone was not truncated upon loading by a root nameserver.

According to technical observers the single .root entry was replaced in 2006 with just vrsn-end-of-zone-marker-dummy-record, to be reintroduced later in 2006 in its original form. The entry was deleted again during the preparations for the deployment of DNSSEC at the root zone in 2010.^[1][2]

The existence of the record was observed with the domain information groper (dig) utility by querying for a TXT record for the domain name:

dig vrsn-end-of-zone-marker-dummy-record.root

This entry returned the word "plenus", which is Latin for full or complete.

References

1. ↑
2. ↑

External links

• The root zone file

ca:.root cs:.root da:.root es:.root gl:.root it:.root ja:Vrsn-end-of-zone-marker-dummy-record.root no:.root pl:.root sv:Toppdom n ur:Root.