DNS Complexity: Although it contains just a few simple rules, DNS has grown into an enormously complex system.
DNS is a distributed, coherent, reliable, autonomous, hierarchical database, the first and only one of its kind. Created in the 1980s when the Internet was still young but overrunning its original system for translating host names into IP addresses, DNS is one of the foundation technologies that made the worldwide Internet possible. Yet this did not all happen smoothly, and DNS technology has been periodically refreshed and refined. Though it’s still possible to describe DNS in simple terms, the underlying details are by now quite sublime. This article explores the supposed and true definitions of DNS and shows some of the tension between these two definitions through the lens of the Internet protocol development philosophy.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is thought of as having the simple-sounding task of resolving domains into IP addresses. With its stub resolvers, different layers of recursive resolvers, authoritative nameservers, a multitude of query types, and DNSSEC, ...
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental building block of the Internet. Today, the performance of more and more applications depend not only on the responsiveness of DNS, but also the exact answer returned by the queried DNS resolver, e.g., for ...
