Distributed Name Service (DNS) Management Operations Manual

How to Define DNS Names
Building and Modifying the DNS Database
4–26 31258 Tandem Computers Incorporated
DNS ensures that every alias corresponds to a particular subsystem-object name or
manager and, thus, to a particular object managed by a subsystem. This
correspondence permits a management application to accept an alias in a command
and to use DNS to translate the alias into the correct subsystem-object name; this
process is known as name resolution.
Below is an example of name resolution. In Figure 4-12, the terminal has the alias
MYTERM, and DNS permits you to enter the command STATUS MYTERM to your
management application and receive a display showing the status of the terminal
known to Pathway as TERM-006 UNDER \B.$PM. The correspondence between
subsystem-object names and aliases also allows an application to translate a
subsystem-object name into an appropriate alias before displaying a message about
the object to a user.
Figure 4-12. Name Resolution
Subsystem Object Name
Alias
DNS
TERM-006 (UNDER \B.$PM)
MYTERM
S8121-021
When you add an alias definition, you specify the name of the alias and a referent,
which is one of the following:
The name of a system object
The alias type, which is a characterizing tag
The name of the subsystem manager
Specifying the REFERENT attribute is mandatory for an alias definition. Aliases can
be defined with the ADD ALIAS command or when you add a subsystem-object or
manager name definition.
In addition, when creating your alias definition, you can specify the domain for the
alias definition. If you do not specify a domain in the alias definition, the domain of
the referent becomes the domain for the alias. You can change the alias’s domain any
time with the ALTER ALIAS command. In your alias definition, you can also specify
the names of groups to which the alias belongs.