DNS - The Internet's Directory Service, Computer Networking

DNS - The Internet's Directory Service

We human beings can be identified in many ways. For example, we can be identified by the names that appear on our birthcertificates. We can be identified by our social security numbers. We can be identified by our driver's license numbers.Although each of these identifiers can be used to identify people, within a given context, one identifier may be more appropriate than an other. For example, the computers at the IRS (the infamous tax collecting agency in the US) prefer to use fixed-length social security numbers rather than birth-certificate names. On the other hand, ordinary people prefer the more mnemonic birth-certificate names rather than social security numbers. (Indeed, can you imagine saying, "Hi. My name is 132-67-9875. Please meet my husband, 178-87-1146.")

Just as humans can be identified in many ways, so too can Internet hosts. One identifier for a host is its hostname. Hostnames -- such as cnn.com, www.yahoo.com, gaia.cs.umass.edu and surf.eurecom.fr -- are mnemonic and are therefore appreciated by humans. However, hostnames provide little, if any, information about the location within the Internet of the host. (A hostname such as surf.eurecom.fr, which ends with the country code .fr, tells us that the host is in France, but doesn't say much more.) Furthermore, because hostnames can consist of variable-length alpha-numeric characters, they would be difficult to process by routers. For these reasons, hosts are also identified by so-called IP addresses. We will discuss IP addresses in some detail in Chapter 4, but it is useful to say a few brief words about them now. An IP address consists of four bytes and has a rigid hierarchical structure. An IP address looks like 121.7.106.83, where each period separates one of the bytes expressed in decimal notation from 0 to 127. An IP address is hierarchical because as we scan the address from left to right,

we obtain more and more specific information about where (i.e., within which network, in the network of networks) the host is located in the Internet. (Just as when we scan a postal address from bottom to top we obtain more and more specific information about where the residence is located). An IP address is included in the header of each IP datagram, and Internet routers use this IP address to route s datagram towards its destination.

Services Provided by DNS

We have just seen that there are two ways to identify a host -- a hostname and an IP address. People prefer the more mnemonic hostname identifier, while routers prefer fixed-length, hierarchically-structured IP addresses. In order to reconcile these different preferences, we need a directory service that translates hostnames to IP addresses. This is the main task of the the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS is (i) a distributed database implemented in a hierarchy of name

servers and (ii) an application-layer protocol that allows hosts and name servers to communicate in order to provide the translation service. Name servers are usually Unix machines running the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software.

The DNS protocol runs over UDP and uses port 53. Following this chapter we provide interactive links to DNS programs that allow you to translate arbitrary hostnames, among other things.

DNS is commonly employed by other application-layer protocols -- including HTTP, SMTP and FTP - to translate usersupplied host names to IP addresses. As an example, consider what happens when a browser (i.e., an HTTP client), running on some user's machine, requests the URL www.someschool.edu/index.html. In order for the user's machine to be able to send an HTTP request message to the Web server www.someschool.edu, the user's machine must obtain the IP address of www. someschool.edu. This is done as follows. The same user machine runs the client-side of the DNS application. The browser extracts the hostname, www.someschool.edu, from the URL and passes the hostname to the client-side of the DNS application. As part of a DNS query message, the DNS client sends a query containing the hostname to a DNS server. The DNS client eventually receives a reply, which includes the IP address for the hostname. The browser then opens a TCP

connection to the HTTP server process located at that IP address. All IP datagrams sent to from the client to server as part of this connection will include this IP address in the destination address field of the datagrams. In particular, the IP datagram(s) that encapsulate the HTTP request message use this IP address. We see from this example that DNS adds an additional delay

-- sometimes substantial -- to the Internet applications that use DNS. Fortunately, as we shall discuss below, the desired IP address is often cached in a "near by" DNS name server, which helps to reduce the DNS network traffic as well as the average DNS delay.