Perl for System Administration

Chapter 5. TCP/IP Name Services

The majority of the conversations between computers these days take place using a protocol called Transmission Control Protocol running over a lower layer called Internet Protocol. ^[13] These two protocols are commonly lumped together into the acronym TCP/IP. Every machine that participates on a TCP/IP network must be assigned at least one unique numeric identifier, called an IP address. IP addresses are usually written using the form NNN.NNN.N.N, e.g., 192.168.1.9.

While machines are content to call each other by strings of dot-separated numbers, most people are less enamored by this idea. TCP/IP would have fallen flat on its face as a protocol if users had to remember a unique 12-digit sequence for every machine they wanted to contact. Mechanisms had to be invented to manage and distribute an IP address to human-friendly name mappings.

This chapter describes the evolution of the network name services that allow us to access data at www.oog.org instead of at 192.168.1.9, and what takes place behind the scenes. Along the way we combine a dash of history with a healthy serving of practical advice on how Perl can help to manage this crucial part of any networking infrastructure.

Host Files

The first approach used to solve the problem of mapping IP addresses to names was the most obvious and simple one: a standard file was created to hold a table of IP addresses and their corresponding computer names. This file can be found as /etc/hosts