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DNS and BIND, 5th Edition
book

DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

by Cricket Liu, Paul Albitz
May 2006
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
18h 40m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

Chapter 1. Background

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

It’s important to know a little ARPAnet history to understand the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS was developed to address particular problems on the ARPAnet, and the Internet—a descendant of the ARPAnet—is still its main user.

If you’ve been using the Internet for years, you can probably skip this chapter. If you haven’t, we hope it’ll give you enough background to understand what motivated the development of DNS.

A (Very) Brief History of the Internet

In the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA (later DARPA), began funding the ARPAnet, an experimental wide area computer network that connected important research organizations in the United States. The original goal of the ARPAnet was to allow government contractors to share expensive or scarce computing resources. From the beginning, however, users of the ARPAnet also used the network for collaboration. This collaboration ranged from sharing files and software and exchanging electronic mail—now commonplace—to joint development and research using shared remote computers.

The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite was developed in the early 1980s and quickly became the standard host-networking protocol on the ARPAnet. The inclusion of the protocol ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596100574Supplemental ContentErrata Page