Route 53’s Name Servers are Sending a Secret Message

If you’ve ever created a private hosted zone in Route 53, you may have noticed it always assigns the same name servers:

1 ns-1536.awsdns-00.co.uk.
2 ns-0.awsdns-00.com.
3 ns-1024.awsdns-00.org.
4 ns-512.awsdns-00.net.

The numbers don’t seem to be coincidental.

1536 is the RFC number for “Common DNS Implementation Errors.”

512 and 1024 (binary 2^9 and 2^10 respectively) are common numbers in computing.

0 is just, well, 0.