Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

Name Resolution

IP is designed to work with the 32-bit IP addresses of the source and the destination hosts. People, however, are much better at using and remembering names than IP addresses. Because computers are used by people and people would rather use names than numbers, developing a method of associating a computer's name with its IP address was necessary. The designers of TCP/IP designed a mechanism for assigning names to IP nodes to ensure its uniqueness and resolving a name to its IP address.

Originally, every host on the Internet maintained its own complete copy of this database or HOSTS file. However, as the Internet grew, this soon became unwieldy both in size and the amount of administrative overhead. The Domain Name System (DNS) ...