DNS Configuration and Management Manual (G06.25+, H06.03+)

HP DNS Configuration and Management Manual—529432-001
2-1
2 Introduction to DNS 9.2.3
This section serves as a brief introduction to the Domain Name System (DNS) 9.2.3
process. For a more thorough discussion of DNS 9.2.3, see the BIND 9 Administrator
Reference Manual in the NonStop Technical Library (NTL).
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Overview on page 2-1
•
Restrictions and Features on page 2-2
•
Assumptions and Dependencies on page 2-2
•
Tools on page 2-2
•
named-bootconf on page 2-2
•
nsupdate on page 2-3
•
rndc (remote name daemon control) on page 2-3
Overview
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is an implementation of the DNS protocols and
provides an implementation of the major components of the DNS, including:
•
A Domain Name System server (named process)
•
A Domain Name System resolver library
•
Tools for verifying the proper operation of the DNS server
DNS 9.2.3 is a port of BIND 9.2.3, and no architectural changes were made to the
product during the porting.
The system that provides the name-resolution feature (to resolve names into IP
addresses) is called the Name Server. The core process of DNS is a daemon called
named. Depending on the role assigned, the Name Servers can be Primary (Master),
Secondary (Slave), or Caching-only. The Secondary server takes over when the
Primary is down and is updated automatically. A Caching-only server provides only the
caching information to the clients.
Each domain, or the sub-domain, has information (in zone files or data files) about its
hosts and is called Authoritative for these hosts. For hosts about which the domain
does not have any information or for which it is Non-Authoritative, the domain passes
the query to its parent domain.
The clients (hosts) know about their Name Servers through a file called resolv.conf,
which contains addresses of the Name Servers (Primary, Secondary, and
Caching-only) along with the clients’ domain name. The configuration file of the Name
Server is named.conf, which contains server parameters and references to other data
files containing the host information.