DNS on Windows 2000, Second 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—remains 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 an experimental wide area computer network that connected important research organizations in the U.S., called the ARPANET. 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 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) protocol suite was developed in the early 1980s and quickly became the standard host-networking protocol on the ARPANET. The inclusion of the ...