Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 3 61

Conﬁguring and Administering the BIND Name Service

Overview of the BIND Name Service

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is the Berkeley

implementation of DNS (Domain Name System). It is a database,

distributed across the Internet, which maps host names to internet

addresses, maps internet addresses to host names, and facilitates

internet mail routing. This section describes the components of BIND

and how they work. It contains the following sections:

• “Beneﬁts of Using BIND” on page 61

• “The DNS Name Space” on page 62

• “How BIND Works” on page 63

• “How BIND Resolves Host Names” on page 65

Beneﬁts of Using BIND

This section explains the advantages of BIND over the other name

services available on HP-UX (NIS and the /etc/hosts ﬁle):

• You store information for only the hosts in your local domain.

You conﬁgure the hosts in your own domain, and you conﬁgure the

addresses of name servers in other domains. Your name server can

contact these other name servers when it fails to resolve a host name

from its local database.

If you use the /etc/hosts ﬁle or the NIS or NIS+ hosts database

for host name resolution, you must explicitly conﬁgure every host you

might need to contact.

• You can store all host information on one host. You conﬁgure

one machine as a name server, and all other machines query the

name server. Information must be kept up to date on only one host

instead of many.

If you use the /etc/hosts ﬁle for host name resolution, you must

keep an up-to-date copy of it on every host in your domain. If you use

NIS, you must make sure that your NIS slave servers receive regular

updates from the master server.