Is managing the host name and IP address information on your network getting to be a hassle? We explain configuring the Domain Name Service (DNS) in plain English.
Some of us are old enough to remember a day when the Internet existed only as a Department of Defense research project called the Arpanet. Back then there were few enough hosts on the Net that they could all be listed in text files stored on each Internet-connected host. The /etc/hosts file on Unix systems originally served that purpose — it contained a list of the names of all the computers on the Net, and associated those human readable names with their machine readable IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. So when a human typed in any computer’s name, that computer’s matching IP address could be instantly looked up in /etc/hosts.
Nowadays, this sort of system would be totally unmanageable due to the huge number of hosts and domains on the Internet, where it’s estimated that more than 50,000 new domain names are registered each day. The Domain Name Service (DNS, also often referred to as the Domain Name System) was created to help solve this problem. DNS is essentially a huge conga line of servers (called name servers) snaking through the Internet. For any computer connected to the Net, a given DNS server can provide you with that computer’s host name and IP address information itself, or the server…
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