14.2 DNS Basics

14.2 DNS Basics

The DNS name space is hierarchical, similar to the Unix filesystem. Figure 14.1 shows this hierarchical organization.

Figure 14.1. Hierarchical organization of the DNS.
graphics/14fig01.gif

Every node (circles in Figure 14.1) has a label of up to 63 characters. The root of the tree is a special node with a null label. Any comparison of labels considers uppercase and lowercase characters the same. The domain name of any node in the tree is the list of labels, starting at that node, working up to the root, using a period ("dot") to separate the labels. (Note that this is different from the Unix filesystem, which forms a pathname by starting at the top and going down the tree.) Every node in the tree must have a unique domain name, but the same label can be used at different points in the tree.

A domain name that ends with a period is called an absolute domain name or a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). An example is sun.tuc.noao.edu. . If the domain name does not end with a period, it is assumed that the name needs to be completed. How the name is completed depends on the DNS software being used. If the uncompleted name consists of two or more labels, it might be considered to be complete; otherwise a local addition might be added to the right of the name. For example, the name sun might be completed by adding the local suffix .tuc.noao.edu. .

The top-level domains are divided into three areas:

  1. arpa is a special domain used for address-to-name mappings. (We describe this in Section 14.5.)

  2. The seven 3-character domains are called the generic domains. Some texts call these the organizational domains.

  3. All the 2-character domains are based on the country codes found in ISO 3166. These are called the country domains, or the geographical domains.

Figure 14.2 lists the normal classification of the seven generic domains.

Figure 14.2. The 3-character generic domains.
graphics/14fig02.gif

DNS folklore says that the 3-character generic domains are only for U.S. organizations, and the 2-character country domains for everyone else, but this is false. There are many non-U.S. organizations in the generic domains, and many U.S. organizations in the .us country domain. (RFC 1480 [Cooper and Postel 1993] describes the .us domain in more detail.) The only generic domains that are restricted to the United States are .gov and .mil.

Many countries form second-level domains beneath their 2-character country code similar to the generic domains: .ac.uk, for example, is for academic institutions in the United Kingdom and .co.uk is for commercial organizations in the United Kingdom.

One important feature of the DNS that isn't shown in figures such as Figure 14.1 is the delegation of responsibility within the DNS. No single entity manages every label in the tree. Instead, one entity (the NIC) maintains a portion of the tree (the top-level domains) and delegates responsibility to others for specific zones.

A zone is a subtree of the DNS tree that is administered separately. A common zone is a second-level domain, noao.edu, for example. Many second-level domains then divide their zone into smaller zones. For example, a university might divide itself into zones based on departments, and a company might divide itself into zones based on branch offices or internal divisions.

If you are familiar with the Unix filesystem, notice that the division of the DNS tree into zones is similar to the division of a logical Unix filesystem into physical disk partitions. Just as we can't tell from Figure 14.1 where the zones of authority lie, we can't tell from a similar picture of a Unix filesystem which directories are on which disk partitions.

Once the authority for a zone is delegated, it is up to the person responsible for the zone to provide multiple name servers for that zone. Whenever a new system is installed in a zone, the DNS administrator for the zone allocates a name and an IP address for the new system and enters these into the name server's database. This is where the need for delegation becomes obvious. At a small university, for example, one person could do this each time a new system was added, but in a large university the responsibility would have to be delegated (probably by departments), since one person couldn't keep up with the work.

A name server is said to have authority for one zone or multiple zones. The person responsible for a zone must provide a primary name server for that zone and one or more secondary name servers. The primary and secondaries must be independent and redundant servers so that availability of name service for the zone isn't affected by a single point of failure.

The main difference between a primary and secondary is that the primary loads all the information for the zone from disk files, while the secondaries obtain all the information from the primary. When a secondary obtains the information from its primary we call this a zone transfer.

When a new host is added to a zone, the administrator adds the appropriate information (name and IP address minimally ) to a disk file on the system running the primary. The primary name server is then notified to reread its configuration files. The secondaries query the primary on a regular basis (normally every 3 hours) and if the primary contains newer data, the secondary obtains the new data using a zone transfer.

What does a name server do when it doesn't contain the information requested ? It must contact another name server. (This is the distributed nature of the DNS.) Not every name server, however, knows how to contact every other name server. Instead every name server must know how to contact the root name servers. As of April 1993 there were eight root servers and all the primary servers must know the IP address of each root server. (These IP addresses are contained in the primary's configuration files. The primary servers must know the IP addresses of the root servers, not their DNS names .) The root servers then know the name and location (i.e., the IP address) of each authoritative name server for all the second-level domains. This implies an iterative process: the requesting name server must contact a root server. The root server tells the requesting server to contact another server, and so on. We'll look into this procedure with some examples later in this chapter.

You can fetch the current list of root servers using anonymous FTP. Obtain the file net info /root-servers.txt from either ftp.rs.internic.net or nic.ddn.mil.

A fundamental property of the DNS is caching. That is, when a name server receives information about a mapping (say, the IP address of a hostname) it caches that information so that a later query for the same mapping can use the cached result and not result in additional queries to other servers. Section 14.7 shows an example of caching.



TCP.IP Illustrated, Volume 1. The Protocols
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1: The Protocols (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
ISBN: 0201633469
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1993
Pages: 378

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