DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Dial-up Connections

Another relatively recent development in networking that presents a challenge to DNS is the dial-up Internet connection. When the Internet was young and DNS was born, there was no such thing as a dial-up connection. With the enormous explosion in the Internet’s popularity and the propagation of Internet service providers who offer dial-up Internet connectivity to the masses, a whole new breed of problems with name service has been introduced.

We’ll separate dial-up connections into two categories: simple dial-up, by which we mean a single computer that connects to the Internet occasionally, when a user manually initiates a connection; and dial-on-demand, which means one or more computers that connect to the Internet automatically whenever they generate traffic bound for the Internet. Often, the device that makes this dial-on-demand connectivity possible is a small dial-up router with an analog modem or ISDN interface, such as an Ascend Pipeline 25.

Simple Dial-up

The easiest way to deal with simple dial-up is to configure your dial-up computer’s resolver to use a name server provided by your ISP. Most ISPs run name servers for their subscribers’ use. If you’re not sure whether your ISP provides name servers for your use or if you don’t know what their IP addresses are, check their web site, send them email, or give them a call.

Some operating systems, including all modern versions of Windows, will let you define a set of name servers for a particular dial-up ...