IT leaders are tasked with making technical magic, improving customer experience, and boosting the bottom line yet often without any increase to the IT budget. How are organizations striking the balance between new initiatives and cost control Download our report to learn about the biggest challenges and how savvy IT executives are overcoming them. Video. Sponsored Video. Slideshows. Twitter Feed. Domain Name System Wikipedia. The Domain Name System DNS is a hierarchical decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most prominently, it translates more readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols. By providing a worldwide, distributed directory service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of the functionality on the Internet, that has been in use since 1. The Domain Name System delegates the responsibility of assigning domain names and mapping those names to Internet resources by designating authoritative name servers for each domain. Network administrators may delegate authority over sub domains of their allocated name space to other name servers. This mechanism provides distributed and fault tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database. The Domain Name System also specifies the technical functionality of the database service that is at its core. It defines the DNS protocol, a detailed specification of the data structures and data communication exchanges used in the DNS, as part of the Internet Protocol Suite. A reverse lookup is a query of the DNS for domain names when the IP address is known. Multiple domain names may be associated with an IP address. There are a number of nefarious activities to watch out for when your Social Security number has been compromised. With the recent Equifax data breach, you might be. Historically, other directory services preceding DNS were not scalable to large or global directories as they were originally based on text files, prominently the HOSTS. TXT resolver. The Internet maintains two principal namespaces, the domain name hierarchy1 and the Internet Protocol IP address spaces. The Domain Name System maintains the domain name hierarchy and provides translation services between it and the address spaces. Internet name servers and a communication protocol implement the Domain Name System. A DNS name server is a server that stores the DNS records for a domain a DNS name server responds with answers to queries against its database. The most common types of records stored in the DNS database are for Start of Authority SOA, IP addresses A and AAAA, SMTPmail exchangers MX, name servers NS, pointers for reverse DNS lookups PTR, and domain name aliases CNAME. Although not intended to be a general purpose database, DNS can store records for other types of data for either automatic lookups, such as DNSSEC records, or for human queries such as responsible person RP records. As a general purpose database, the DNS has also been used in combating unsolicited email spam by storing a real time blackhole list. The DNS database is traditionally stored in a structured zone file. Download Database Model Diagram Visio 2010. FunctioneditAn often used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name www. IPv. 4 and 2. 60. IPv. 6. Unlike a phone book, DNS can be quickly updated, allowing a services location on the network to change without affecting the end users, who continue to use the same host name. Users take advantage of this when they use meaningful Uniform Resource Locators URLs, and e mail addresses without having to know how the computer actually locates the services. An important and ubiquitous function of DNS is its central role in distributed Internet services such as cloud services and content delivery networks. When a user accesses a distributed Internet service using a URL, the domain name of the URL is translated to the IP address of a server that is proximal to the user. The key functionality of DNS exploited here is that different users can simultaneously receive different translations for the same domain name, a key point of divergence from a traditional phone book view of the DNS. This process of using the DNS to assign proximal servers to users is key to providing faster and more reliable responses on the Internet and is widely used by most major Internet services. The DNS reflects the structure of administrative responsibility in the Internet. Each subdomain is a zone of administrative autonomy delegated to a manager. For zones operated by a registry, administrative information is often complemented by the registrys RDAP and WHOIS services. That data can be used to gain insight on, and track responsibility for, a given host on the Internet. HistoryeditUsing a simpler, more memorable name in place of a hosts numerical address dates back to the ARPANET era. The Stanford Research Institute now SRI International maintained a text file named HOSTS. TXT that mapped host names to the numerical addresses of computers on the ARPANET. Maintenance of numerical addresses, called the Assigned Numbers List, was handled by Jon Postel at the University of Southern Californias Information Sciences Institute ISI, whose team worked closely with SRI. Addresses were assigned manually. To request a host name and an address and add a computer to the master file, users contacted the SRIs Network Information Center NIC, directed by Elizabeth Feinler, by telephone during business hours. By the early 1. 98. Postel directed the task of forging a compromise between five competing proposals of solutions to Paul Mockapetris. Mockapetris instead created the Domain Name System. The Internet Engineering Task Force published the original specifications in RFC 8. RFC 8. 83 in November 1. In 1. 98. 4, four UC Berkeley students, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server implementation for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, commonly referred to as BIND. In 1. 98. 5, Kevin Dunlap of DEC substantially revised the DNS implementation. Mike Karels, Phil Almquist, and Paul Vixie have maintained BIND since then. In the early 1. 99. BIND was ported to the Windows NT platform. It was widely distributed, especially on Unix systems, and is still the most widely used DNS software on the Internet. In November 1. 98. RFC 1. 03. 41 and RFC 1. DNS specifications. Several additional Request for Comments have proposed extensions to the core DNS protocols. Structure editDomain name spaceeditThe domain name space consists of a tree data structure. Each node or leaf in the tree has a label and zero or more resource records RR, which hold information associated with the domain name. The domain name itself consists of the label, possibly concatenated with the name of its parent node on the right, separated by a dot. The tree sub divides into zones beginning at the root zone. A DNS zone may consist of only one domain, or may consist of many domains and sub domains, depending on the administrative choices of the zone manager. DNS can also be partitioned according to class the separate classes can be thought of as an array of parallel namespace trees. The hierarchical Domain Name System for class Internet, organized into zones, each served by a name server. Administrative responsibility over any zone may be divided by creating additional zones. Authority over the new zone is said to be delegated to a designated name server. The parent zone ceases to be authoritative for the new zone. Domain name syntaxeditThe definitive descriptions of the rules for forming domain names appear in RFC 1. RFC 1. 12. 3, and RFC 2. A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels, that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example. The right most label conveys the top level domain for example, the domain name www. The hierarchy of domains descends from right to left each label to the left specifies a subdivision, or subdomain of the domain to the right. For example the label example specifies a subdomain of the com domain, and www is a subdomain of example. This tree of subdivisions may have up to 1. A label may contain zero to 6. The null label, of length zero, is reserved for the root zone.