Ulanowski 1

Andrew Ulanowski
Janet Griffin
CIS 100
April 29, 2015

The Domain Name System

DNS, (Domain Name System), was originally invented to support the growth of
email communication on the ARPANET (Stewart).
Imagine if we had to remember all of our phone numbers by heart! Our phones
contact list allows us to look up a name, but dial a number, since alphabetic names are
much easier to remember than semantically meaningless numeric addresses (Stewart).
DNS provides transparent (to the user) mapping of human-friendly host names (name of
a device) to the network address of that device.
Table 1 Example of Host Name to IP Address Mapping

Host Name
microsoft.com
FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name)
www.microsoft.com

IP Address
99.66.78.234
IP Address
99.66.78.234

As it stands (prior to 1984) there was no such thing as DNS (Shinder, Shinder
and Grasdal). Life before DNS began as a humble HOSTS file which provided
mapping between host names and network addresses in a simple set of text records
(Stewart). After a while, many more hosts were added to the network and the HOSTS
file became cumbersome, inefficient and error prone (Stewart). The HOSTS file still
exists on many systems today though most contain only one active entry for the host

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name localhost, which points to the loopback IP address of 127.0.0.1 (Shinder, Shinder
and Grasdal).
Sending email was the original purpose of host names. To send an email to
someone, you had to first be a human router, as email was sent from site to site to its
destination along the path of systems (Stewart).
Domain names were created to provide each person with one address and
allowed email to be sent using relative addressing, which is how we do things now.
(Stewart)
Administrators of large-scale networks must keep track of hundreds of
thousands of IP addresses as employees rely on more and more devices to do their
daily work. (Dooley). IP (Internet Protocol) address management can be made easier
through the use of . . . enterprise IP management systems (Dooley). These
management systems along with DNS and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration
Table 2 Domain Hierarchy

Protocol) services can streamline and

centralize

IP

network

management

(Shinder, Shinder and Grasdal).

A DNS server is a computer that
contains a database of host names and IP
addresses (Shinder, Shinder and Grasdal).
A device configured as a DNS client may
query a DNS server for the purpose of resolving names to IP addresses (Shinder,
Shinder and Grasdal). A DNS server is a stand-alone server on a network and will
resolve names to IP addresses, as long as the DNS client has access to it (Shinder,

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Shinder and Grasdal).

On the Internet there are groups of DNS servers which

Collectively . . . comprise a distributed, hierarchical database containing resource

records which define host to IP name mapping for the entire Internet (Shinder, Shinder
and Grasdal). DNS servers resource records are distributed, and because DNS uses
an efficient protocol for name resolution (UDP), its performance is exceptional (Shinder,
Shinder and Grasdal). The hierarchical nature of DNS results in an FQDN (Fully
Qualified

Domain

Name)

which

(Table

2)

is

represented

by

www.research.microsoft.com, which is read from top to bottom in the hierarchical

notation. DNS allows us to connect to all of our favorite web and social networking sites
and for those sites to locate us as well!
The growth of the internet is making services like DNS needed more and more
each day as we access information from virtually any place (Dooley). New ideas like
e-commerce, e-business, VoIP, multimedia and VPNs are driving hardware, software
and services like never before.
DNS supports much more than email these days. The management of this giant
contact list must remain steady and manageable. Laying these early tracks gives us a
transparent access to millions of resources on the Internet and allows the world to grow
smaller daily.

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Works Cited
Dooley, Michael. "Bring Order To IP Networking Chaos." Communications News (2000):
1-2.
Shinder, Thomas W., Debra Littlejohn Shinder and Martin Grasdal. MCSE Planning and
Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure: Exam 70-293 Study
Guide and DVD Training System. Maryland Heights: Syngress Publishing, 2003.
Stewart, William. "DNS History." 7 January 2000. Living Internet. 29 April 2015
<http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_dns_history.htm>.