Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Name Service

Each host on a network has a name that points to information about that host. Hostnames can be assigned to any device that has an IP address. A name service translates the hostnames (which are easy for people to remember) to IP addresses (the numbers the computer deals with).

DNS and BIND

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed database of information about hosts on a network. Its structure is similar to that of the Unix filesystem—an inverted tree, with the root at the top. The branches of the tree are called domains (or subdomains) and correspond to IP addresses. The most popular implementation of DNS is the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) software.

DNS works as a client/server application. The resolver is the client, the software that asks questions about host information. The nameserver is the process that answers the questions. The server side of BIND is the named daemon. You can interactively query nameservers for host information with the dig and host commands. See Chapter 3 for more details on named, dig, and host.

The nameserver of a domain is responsible for keeping (and providing on request) the names of the machines in its domain. Other nameservers on the network forward requests for these machines to this nameserver.

Domain names

The full domain name is the sequence of names from the current domain back to the root, with a period separating the names. For instance, oreilly.com indicates the domain oreilly (for O’Reilly Media, Inc.), which is under ...