Use this page to learn about the regional server deployment for NOAA.GOV domains. It can also assist subdomain administrators with maintaining DNS information for their subdomains.

The NOAA.GOV Regions

The NOAA.GOV domain is divided into four (4) geographic regions:

West Washington, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, California, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska Midwest North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado Southeast Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina Northeast Kentucky, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine

How The NOC Provides DNS For The NOAA.GOV Domain The top level domain name server for the NOAA.GOV domain is ns.noaa.gov. The NOC staff located in Silver Spring, MD maintains this nameserver. In addition there are four geographically distributed secondary servers located in Seattle, WA. (nwrns.noaa.gov), Boulder, CO. (mwrns.noaa.gov), Miami, FL. (serns.noaa.gov) and Ann Arbor, MI (merns.noaa.gov). The server of authority (SOA) for the noaa.gov domain is ns.noaa.gov, it too is being secondaried by the four regional nameservers. This means that every one of those secondary servers can answer any query that ns.noaa.gov can. This scheme insures NOAA with a robust and fault tolerant DNS. The NOAA/NOC supplies secondary DNS service to any of the NOAA.GOV subdomains that would like to obtain dns redundancy. This is done with the 4 regional servers: mwrns.noaa.gov, merns.noaa.gov, serns.noaa.gov and nwrns.noaa.gov. The NOC's regional servers contain authoritative dns data for all domains that they serve. This means that the secondaries can provide data that is known to be valid, just like the subdomains own primary dns server would provide. Here is an example of how the NOC's regional dns servers operate: An end user wants to telnet to the hostname machine.place.noaa.gov. They type in the hostname, and that needs to be mapped to an Internet address. The user's dns resolver would perform a search for an authoritative answer to the hostname query. If the user's dns server knows nothing about machine.place.noaa.gov, it would direct the query to one of the root nameservers at either GSA, INTERNIC or ARIN. The returned answer would also tell the user's dns server other data such as additional authoritative nameservers, such as mwrns.noaa.gov, merns.noaa.gov, serns.noaa.gov and nwrns.noaa.gov, that may be queried for that and other data pertaining to the place.noaa.gov subdomain the next time a query is performed. NOAA.GOV Secondary DNS Servers West Region Regional server: nwrns.noaa.gov Location: Seattle, WA Managed by: Mike Knezevich     Michael.T.Knezevich@noaa.gov Midwest Region Regional server: mwrns.noaa.gov Location: Boulder, CO Managed by: Alex Hsia     Alex.Hsia@noaa.gov Southeast Region Regional server: serns.noaa.gov Location: Miami, FL Managed by: John McKeever    John.McKeever@noaa.gov Northeast Regional server: merns.noaa.gov Location: Ann Arbor, MI Managed by: John Fenton     John.F.Fenton@noaa.gov   What is a secondary name server? A secondary name server gets its zone data from a name server that is authoritative for that particular zone. The secondary server contacts the primary name server it receives updates from and pulls the zone data over. This action is called a zone transfer The NOAA/NOC has created an automated utility that updates each regional server each time a modification is made to the primary DNS database. Depending on the Start of Authority (SOA) values, each server will check the accuracy of its data and load the new zone data, if necessary.