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Essay on Binds Vs. Dns
The domain name system (DNS) is the way that Internet domain names are located and translated into Internet Protocol addresses. A domain name is a meaningful and easy-to-remember "handle" for an Internet address.
Because maintaining a central list of domain name/IP address correspondences would be impractical, the lists of domain names and IP addresses are distributed throughout the Internet in a hierarchy of authority. There is probably a DNS server within close geographic proximity to your access provider that maps the domain names in your Internet requests or forwards them to other servers in the Internet (Cricket, 2002).
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is the most popular DNS server. BIND servers translate Internet domain names to and from numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS name service software is conceptually divided in to two components – a revolver and a name server. The revolver is the software the forms the query; it ask the questions. The name server is the process that responds to the query; it answers the questions.
The resolver does not exist as a distinct process running on the computer. Rather the resolver is a library of software routines that is linked into any program that needs to look up addresses. The library knows how to ask the name server for host information (Nicolai, 2000).
Under BIND, all computers use resolver-code, but not all computers run the same server process. A computer that does not run a local name server process and relies on the other systems for all name servers is called a resolver-only system (Craig, 2002). The BIND name server runs as a distinct process called named. Name servers are classified differently depending on how they are configured.
The BIND server answers name queries and it runs as a daemon. It is configured by the named.boot file, which defines where the server gets the domain database information and the type of server being configured. The server types are primary, secondary and caching servers (Craig, 2002).
