The Domain Name System (DNS) is the internet base service and serves as a phonebook for the internet browsing software while creating connections with different servers around the world. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control email delivery. Most internet services rely on DNS to work. If DNS fails or is too slow, web sites cannot be located and email delivery stalls.
The DNS has its roots back into the ARPAnet era, when it became more common the practice of using names as a more human-likely way of expressing a machine’s numerical address on a network, and by this it predates even TCP/IP networks . However back then, was used a different system, as the DNS was invented in 1983, shortly after TCP/IP was deployed. In the older network system, every computer in a network retrieved a file named “hosts.txt” from a computer at SRI (now SRI International). The “hosts.txt” file linked numerical addresses to names. There still exists a hosts file on most modern operating systems, by default or if not it can be created through configuration setting , and allows users to specify an IP address (eg. 192.168.1.15) to use for a hostname (eg. www.yourhost.com) without checking an external DNS. As of 2006, the hosts file serves primarily for troubleshooting DNS errors or for mapping local addresses to more organic names. However systems based on a hosts files are more limited, because of the obvious fact that every time a one of the network computers is changing it’s address, every computer that seeks to communicate with it would need an update to its hosts file.
The growth of networking called for a more scalable system: one that recorded a change in a host’s address in one place only. Other hosts would learn about the change dynamically through a notification system, thus completing a globally accessible network of all hosts’ names and their associated IP Addresses.
At the request of Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name system in 1983 and wrote the first implementation. The original description appears in RFC 882 and RFC 883. In November 1987, the publication of RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 updated the DNS specification and made RFC 882 and RFC 883 obsolete. Several more-recent RFCs have proposed various extensions to the core DNS protocols.
In 1984, four students from the Berkeley University — Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou — wrote the first UNIX implementation of the DNS, which was maintained by Ralph Campbell thereafter. In 1985, Kevin Dunlap of DEC significantly re-wrote the DNS implementation and renamed it BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, previously: Berkeley Internet Name Daemon). Mike Karels, Phil Almquist and Paul Vixie have maintained BIND since then. BIND was ported to the Windows NT platform in the early 1990s.
Due to BIND’s long history of security issues and exploits, several alternative nameserver and resolver programs have been written and distributed in recent years.
[...] servers around the world. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresshttp://www.modblog.net/what-on-earth-is-dns/NETSPROJECT… students’ understanding of the different systems on earth and how they affect each [...]