OpenView Network Node Manager: Designing and Implementing an Enterprise Solution

Introduction

Network Node Manager may do hundreds of forward and reverse lookups at a busy time as it goes about the business of discovery, configuration management, and status checking. This requires a reliable, accurate, high-performance Domain Name System (DNS). This chapter reviews the operation and configuration for DNS as it is assumed the reader is already familiar with it.

DNS is a critical, heavily-used resource for NNM. DNS efficiently provides name-to-address (forward) lookups as well as address-to-name (reverse) lookups that are critical to NNM’s configuration management.

Before DNS there was /etc/hosts, a simple linear file containing the names and IP addresses of networked systems. The size and distribution problems associated ...