CHAPTER
15 The Domain Name System
Computers are designed to work with numbers, while humans are more comfortable working with words. This fundamental dichotomy is the reason why the Domain Name System (DNS) came to be. Back in the dark days of the 1970s, when the Internet was the ARPANET and the entire experimental network consisted of only a few hundred systems, a need was recognized for a mechanism that would permit users to refer to the network’s computers by name, rather than by address. The introduction of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocols in the early 1980s led to the use of 32-bit IP addresses, which even in dotted decimal form were difficult to remember.
Host Tables
The first mechanism for assigning ...
Get Networking The Complete Reference, Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
