NOTE: First, I already checked a lot of questions related to the topic, but none of those shed some light. Indeed there are similar questions around.

That said, here I go. I have a domain name called example.com and a subdomain called play.example.com. Both are A records, since they resolve to different machines.

Using dig tool to check them, they both work correctly.

However, I want to add a SRV record:

The srv record entry is like the following (done through Namecheap interface):

• target: _ors._tcp.play.example.com. — (other fields)

When I try to resolve this via nslookup, like this:

nslookup -type=SRV _ors._tcp.play.example.com

Things do not work at all. I get this error:

server can't find _ors._tcp.play.cppmaster.net: NXDOMAIN

However, if I set a record like this one (without subdomain):

- target: _ors._tcp.example.com. -- (other fields)

then things do work.

My question is, why the former fails when the latter works? Digging both A records example.com and play.example.com do work, but SRV query fails only for the subdomain SRV record, and not for the top-level domain.