Domain

Name
System
 DNS Domain Name System

The domain name system is usually used to

translate a host name into an IP address

Domain names comprise a hierarchy so that

names are unique, yet easy to remember.
DNS introduction
 People: many identifiers:
 SSN, name, passport #
 Internet hosts, routers:
 IP address (32 bit) - used for addressing datagrams
 “name”, e.g., cs.pub.ro by humans

Map between IP addresses and name ?

 Domain Name System:
 distributed database
 implemented in hierarchy of many name servers
 application-layer protocol
 host, routers, name servers to communicate to resolve names
(address/name translation)
 Note: core Internet function, implemented as application-layer protocol
 Complexity at network’s “edge”
In The Beginning...

 Early host database was a text file

 Operational nightmare!
 Rate of change in file was growing exponentially
 NIC staff overwhelmed
 Everyone copied it (nightly!) to get current version
 Network overwhelmed
 Many opportunities for errors
 And we experienced many of them
 Fate sharing model wrong
 Affected parties couldn’t change database
DNS begining
…. there was the HOSTS.TXT file

 Before DNS (until 1985), the name-to-IP address

was done by downloading a single file (hosts.txt)
from a central server with FTP
 Names in hosts.txt are not structured.
 The hosts.txt file still works on most operating systems.
It can be used to define local names.
 /etc/hosts [Unix]
 c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts [Windows]
 A centrally-maintained file, distributed to all hosts
on the Internet
hosts.txt doesn't scale

✗Huge file
✗Needs frequent copying to ALL hosts
✗Consistency
✗Always out-of-date
✗Name uniqueness
✗Single point of administration
Naming

 How do we efficiently locate resources?

 DNS: name -> IP address
 • Challenge
 How do we scale these to the wide area?
Obvious Solutions
Why not centralize DNS?
 Single point of failure
 Traffic volume
 Distant centralized database
 Single point of update
Why not use /etc/hosts?
 Original Name to Address Mapping
 Flat namespace
 /etc/hosts
 SRI kept main copy
 Downloaded regularly
 Count of hosts was increasing: machine per domain -> machine per
user
 Many more downloads
 Many more updates
Domain Name System Goals

 Basically a wide-area distributed database

 Scalability
 Decentralized maintenance
 Robustness
 Global scope
 Names mean the same thing everywhere
 Don’t need
 Atomicity
 Strong consistency
The domain name system was born
(Paul Mockapetris, RFC1034/1035)
 DNS is a Distributed Database for holding name
to IP address (and other) information
 Distributed:
 Shares the administration
 Shares the load
 Robustness and performance through:
 Replication
 Caching
 A critical piece of Internet infrastructure
 Conceptually, programmers can view the DNS
 database as a collection of millions of host entry structures:

/* DNS host entry structure */

struct hostent {
char *h_name; /* official domain name of host */
char **h_aliases; /* null-terminated array of domain names */
int h_addrtype; /* host address type (AF_INET) */
Int h_length; /* length of an address, in bytes */
char **h_addr_list; /* null-terminated array of in_addr structs */
};

 in_addr is a struct consisting of 4-byte IP address

 Functions for retrieving host entries from DNS:
 gethostbyname: query key is a DNS host name.
 gethostbyaddr: query key is an IP address.
Host name structure
 Each host name is made up of a sequence of labels
separated by periods.
 Each label can be up to 63 characters
 The total name can be at most 255 characters.
 Alphanumeric characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and -

 Examples:
 pub.ro
 cs.pub.ro

The most important element of address is on the right

(TLD – top level domain)
Domain Name Space

Label
Each label can be up to 63 characters

Domain Name

Sequence of the labels separated by dots

Domain name space

Children of the node have different labels

Domain names and labels
DNS Name hierarchy
 DNS hierarchy can be
represented by a tree
 Root and top-level
domains are
administered by an
Internet central name Managed
registration authority by Univ T
(ICANN)
Managed by
 Below top-level ECE Dept.

domain, administration
of name space is
delegated to
organizations
 Each organization can
delegate further
Domain name system
.
 Each node in the DNS tree
represents a DNS name
 Each branch below a node is a edu
DNS domain.
 DNS domain can contain
hosts or other domains
(subdomains) virginia.edu

 Example: www.virginia.edu cs.virginia.edu

DNS domains are
., edu, virginia.edu,
cs.virginia.edu
neon.cs.virginia.edu
 Domain names
 Hosts and DNS domains are named based on their position in the domain tree
 Every node in the DNS domain tree can be identified by a unique Fully Qualified
Domain Name (FQDN). The FQDN gives the position in the DNS tree.

 A FQDN consists of labels (“cs”,“virginia”,”edu”) separated by a period (“.”)

 There can be a period (“.”) at the end.
 Each label can be up to 63 characters long
 FQDN contains characters, numerals, and dash character (“-”)
 FQDNs are not case-sensitive
DNS Messages

Header

Question Section

Answer Section

Authoritative Section

Additional Information Section

FQDN and PQDN

FQDN – Full qualified domain name (the name

must end with a null label – the label ends with
dot (.)
PQDN – Partially qualified domain name
 Domains

The domain name for a host is the sequence of labels that lead from
the host (leaf node in the naming tree) to the top of the worldwide
naming tree.
Contains resource records and sub-domains
Some resource records point to authoritative server for sub-
domains / zones
A domain is a subtree of the worldwide naming tree.
Distribution of Name Spaces

Hierarchy of Name Servers

Zone

Root Server

Primary and Secondary Servers

Hierarchy of name servers
 Zones and domains

Its records are held in a database (“zonefile”) and

served from an authoritative name server
Zone refers to all the resource records in a domain but
not its sub domains
A primary server loads all information
from the disk file;
The secondary server loads all
information from the primary server.
DNS In The Internet

Generic Domain

Country Domain

Inverse Domain
Top-level domains
 Three types of top-level domains:
 Organizational: 3-character code indicates the
function of the organization
 Used primarily within the US
 Examples: gov, mil, edu, org, com, net
 Geographical: 2-character country or region code
 Examples: ro, us, va, jp, de
 Reverse domains: A special domain (in-addr.arpa)
used for IP address-to-name mapping

There are more than 200 top-level domains.

DNS in the Internet
Generic domains
Generic domain labels

Label Description

com Commercial organizations

edu Educational institutions

gov Government institutions

int International organizations

mil Military groups

net Network support centers

org Nonprofit organizations

New generic domain labels

Label Description

aero Airlines and aerospace companies

biz Businesses or firms (similar to com)

coop Cooperative business organizations

info Information service providers

museum Museums and other nonprofit organizations

name Personal names (individuals)

pro Professional individual organizations

Country domains
Inverse domain
Using the DNS
 A Domain Name (like www.tiscali.co.uk) is the
KEY to look up information
 The result is one or more RESOURCE RECORDS
(RRs)
 There are different RRs for different types of
information
 You can ask for the specific type you want, or
ask for "any" RRs associated with the domain
name
 What is a resource record?

• A domain contains resource records

• Resource records are analogous to files
• Classified into types
• Some of the important types are SOA, NS, A,
CNAME and MX
• Normally defines in “zone files”
Commonly seen RRs
 A (address): map hostname to IP address
 PTR (pointer): map IP address to name
 MX (mail exchanger): where to deliver mail for
user@domain
 CNAME (canonical name): map alternative
hostname to real hostname
 TXT (text): any descriptive text
 NS (name server), SOA (start of authority): used
for delegation and management of the DNS itself
 The “A” Record
• The “Address” record
• One or more normally defines a host
• Contains an IPv4 Address (the address computers
use to uniquely identify each other on the internet)
Eg. The record:
www A 203.18.56.31
In the ausregistry.com.au domain, defines the host uniquely
identifiable as “www.ausregistry.com.au” to be reachable at
the IPv4 Address 203.18.56.31
 The “CNAME” Record
• A CNAME defines an alias
• The alias will then be resolved, if another CNAME is
encountered then the process continues until an A
record is found
Eg. The record:
search CNAME www.google.com.
In the ausregistry.com.au domain, defines the name uniquely
identifiable as “search.ausregistry.com.au” to be and alias to
“www.google.com”
 The “MX” Record
• An MX record defines the mail servers for a
particular domain
• Mail eXchange records hold the name of hosts, and
their priorities, able to deliver mail for the domain.
Eg. The record:
ausregistry.com.au MX 10 mail
In the ausregistry.com.au domain, defines the host mail to be
the priority 10 mail server for the “ausregistry.com.au”
domain
 The “NS” Record
• An NS record defines the authoritative Name
servers for the domain.
• The “Name Server” records also define the name
servers of children domains
Eg. The record:
internal NS ns1.hosting.com.au.
In the ausregistry.com.au domain, defines the host
“ns1.hosting.com.au” to be a name sever for the
“internal.ausregistry.com.au” sub-domain
 What is a Delegation?

• Delegation refers to the act of putting NS (name

server) records in a domain name “delegating”
control of a sub-domain to another entity
• This entity then has the ability to control the
resource records in this sub-domain and delegate
further children domains to other entities.
Eg. IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) delegating
control of a country code domain to the country.
 DNS is a Client-Server application
 Requests and responses are normally
sent in UDP packets, port 53
 Occasionally uses TCP, port 53
 for very large requests, e.g. zone transfer
from master to slave
 TCP/53 must NOT be filtered.

McGraw-Hill ©The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2004

Resolution

Resolver
Mapping Names to Addresses
Mapping Addresses to Names
Recursive Resolution
Iterative Resolution
Caching
DNS Distributed Database
 There is one primary server for a
domain, and typically a number of
secondary servers containing replicated
databases. rpi.edu DNS server

rpi.edu
rpi.edu rpi.edu
DNSrpi.edu
DB
DNS DB DNS
DNSDBDB

Authoritative Replicas
 There are three roles involved in DNS
Application
e.g. web browser

Caching Authoritative
Resolver
Nameserver Nameserver

 RESOLVER
 Takes request from application, formats it into UDP packet, sends to cache
 CACHING NAMESERVER
 Returns the answer if already known
 Otherwise searches for an authoritative server which has the information
 Caches the result for future queries
 Also known as RECURSIVE nameserver
 AUTHORITATIVE NAMESERVER
 Contains the actual information put into the DNS by the domain owner
DNS Clients
 A DNS client is called a resolver.

 A call to gethostbyname()is handled by

a resolver (typically part of the client).

 Most Unix workstations have the file

/etc/resolv.conf that contains the
local domain and the addresses of DNS
servers for that domain.
Recursive / Iterative resolution

Name – address Resolution mapping

a name to an address or
an address to a name
Query and response messages

Header format