Host Names and Domain Names
Now that we have an understanding of the way MAC addresses and IP addresses work, we can apply yet another layer of indirection to the host-finding process: hostnames and DNS. Early in TCP/IP history, different networked machines were identifiable only by their IP addresses. This worked really well, except for the fact—increasingly important as more and more people came online—that keeping track of all the numbers involved was tedious and error-prone. Hence the introduction of the Domain Name System, a means of assigning common names to IP addresses, resulting in the much easier-to-use system we know today.
DNS records are kept in a centralized database on multiple root servers that are maintained by Network Solutions, ...
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