Skip to Main Content
Linux in a Windows World
book

Linux in a Windows World

by Roderick W Smith
February 2005
Beginner content levelBeginner
496 pages
16h 10m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux in a Windows World

Delivering Names with DNS

A second key network management tool is DNS. DNS servers fill two roles: enabling your local clients to convert names to IP addresses for local and remote computers, and enabling remote systems to find local computers that you choose (such as web or mail servers). One important question is whether you should even run a local DNS server; for many purposes, relying on outside servers makes a lot of sense. Sometimes, though, running a DNS server locally is very helpful. If you decide you want to run your own DNS server, you must be able to configure it. The basic DNS server configuration varies with the server software you select. BIND is the most popular Linux DNS server, and so it’s described in this chapter. Once the basic configuration is set, you must create files that describe the computers on your network—their hostnames, IP addresses, and related characteristics. Finally, you must be able to tell clients to use the DNS servers you’ve configured.

Principles of DNS

DNS is, essentially, a global database of computer names. The huge size of the DNS database presents many challenges, including maintenance of the database and providing storage space for it. Both challenges are overcome by the fact that DNS is a distributed database; no one computer holds all the data in the DNS database. Instead, the DNS namespace is arranged hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy are the top-level domains (TLDs), which appear at the end of a DNS hostname. Common examples ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Ubuntu Made Easy

Ubuntu Made Easy

Rickford Grant, Phil Bull
Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 4th Edition

Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 4th Edition

Rickford Grant, Phil Bull
Fedora Bible 2010 Edition: Featuring Fedora Linux 12

Fedora Bible 2010 Edition: Featuring Fedora Linux 12

Christopher Negus, Eric Foster-Johnson
Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz, Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007582