3. Operation of the Root Zone on the Local Server

The operation of an authoritative server for the root in the system described here can be done separately from the operation of the recursive resolver, or it might be part of the configuration of the recursive resolver system.

The steps to set up the root zone are:

1. Retrieve a copy of the root zone. (See Appendix A for some current locations of sources.)

2. Start the authoritative service for the root zone in a manner that prevents any system other than a recursive resolver on the same host from accessing it.

The contents of the root zone MUST be refreshed using the timers from the SOA record in the root zone, as described in [RFC1035]. This inherently means that the contents of the local root zone will likely be a little behind those of the global root servers, because those servers are updated when triggered by NOTIFY messages.