CHAPTER 16
Domain Name System (DNS)
The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a way to map or translate an unfriendly numerical IP address into a people-friendly format. Although this translation isn’t mandatory, it does make the network much more useful and easy to work with for humans.
At inception of the Internet in the 1970s, IP address–to–name mapping was done through the maintenance of a hosts.txt file that was distributed via FTP to all the machines on the Internet. As the number of hosts grew (starting back in the early 1980s), it was soon clear that a single person maintaining a single file of all of those hosts was not a scalable way of managing the association of IP addresses to hostnames. To solve this problem, a distributed system was ...
Get Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide, Seventh Edition, 7th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
