Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp By David Rhodes, Dominic Butler
Table of Contents
Chapter 16. Configuring DNS
DNS is a mechanism designed to simplify the administration and usability of host names/IP addresses for systems that are connected to a network. While the network may be a local area one, DNS is more commonly used for connections to the Internet. It achieves its goals through two main functions (and many smaller ones!):
It allows us to use names rather than addresses when referring to machines. This is much better for us, since people tend to find it difficult to remember groups of numbers, but relatively easy to remember the corresponding names. For example, www.sun.com is much more memorable than 192.18.97.241.
It acts as a global database to provide the name-to-address mappings by effectively splitting the network data into manageable chunks and allowing them to be administered locally.
