Name2IP / FIELD NOTES

Make sense of DNS answers

A DNS answer is a resolver’s view at a moment in time. Keep the status and the records together.

Read the status first

NOERROR means the query completed without a DNS error; it can still have no record of the requested type. NXDOMAIN means a name does not exist according to the resolver. If a CNAME alias is returned, a nonexistent name can be its target. SERVFAIL and REFUSED are failures, not empty successful answers.

TTL is a countdown, not a deadline for everyone

Time to live tells a cache how long it can reuse an answer. Different resolvers can have different cached versions and remaining TTLs. Our server may reuse a successful answer for at most 60 seconds and never longer than its lowest answer TTL. Cached answers retain the original fetched time; displayed TTLs are those observed then.

Follow aliases without losing context

An A or AAAA question may return CNAME records along with addresses. The table keeps each record’s actual owner name and type. MX values contain preference and host information; TXT is preserved as resolver-provided text. It is not interpreted as HTML or executed.

One perspective, not global propagation

All queries are sent from our server to Cloudflare’s public recursive resolver. This does not test your device’s configured DNS, measure your DNS latency, or sample the world. A DNSSEC authenticated-data flag is shown when supplied; its absence does not by itself mean a broken signature.

Exports are observations

The CSV includes query status, record values, TTL and fetched time. Review exported data before importing it elsewhere. To help avoid spreadsheet formula execution, values that start like formulas receive an apostrophe prefix.

References: Cloudflare DNS JSON API, DNS negative responses, DNS record and status codes.