Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide, Eighth Edition, 8th Edition

CHAPTER
17	Domain Name System (DNS)

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a way to map or translate an unfriendly numerical IP address into a human-friendly format. Although this translation isn’t mandatory, it does make the network much more useful and easier to work with for humans.

At inception of the Internet in the 1970s, IP-address-to-hostname 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, 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 devised in which each ...