Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Name server and DNS (Domain Name Service)

The underlying addressing scheme for the Internet is the dotted decimal form (like 83.166.169.231). Humans prefer to use words instead of numbers, so resources on the Internet are identified with strings of words called URLs or domain names. For example, www.packtpub.com is a domain name and it corresponds to an IP address. The site can be identified by the numeric or the string name.

This technique of mapping IP addresses to symbolic names is called Domain Name Service (DNS). When we enter www.google.com, our computer uses the DNS servers to resolve the domain name into the corresponding IP address. While on a local network, we set up the local DNS to name local machines with symbolic names.

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