BIND&DNS Notes

What is DNS (Domain Name System)?

• a hierarchical, distributed database
• for mapping Internet host names to IP addresses and vice versa
• provides mail routing information

What are the components in the DNS?

• DNS Clients
• resolver library
• DNS server

DNS clients (e.g. Web browser is one of those) look up information in the DNS by calling a resolver library, which sends queries to one or more name servers and interprets the response.

• Domains and Domain Names
• Zones

DNS Servers

Authoritative Name Servers

A name server which contains the complete data for a zone.

• The primary master DNS server: maintains the master copy of the zone data
• Slave DNS servers: (aka secondary servers) load the zone contents from another server using a replication process known as zone transfer.

Non-authoritative Name Servers

• Caching Name Server, or recursive name server

A name server which performs recursive lookups for local clients. Recursive name servers normally cache the results of the lookups they perform to improve performance.

• Forwarder

Some a caching name server may not perform the recursive lookup all by itself. It can forward some or all of the queries to another caching name server, commonly referred to as a forwarder.

Root Zone and Root Name Server

• ftp://ftp.rs.internic.net/domain/

Root Name Servers

• named.cache or
• named.root

Root Zone

• root.zone and
• root.zone.gz (gzip of root.zone)