“Names”

The chapter “Names” from the book “Operating the Internet” delves into the intricacies of how devices connected to the Internet use symbolic names to communicate, navigating the complexity of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. It begins by explaining the necessity of symbolic names, given the human difficulty with remembering numerical IP addresses. This need led to the establishment of a name register at the Network Information Center (NIC), facilitating the association of human-friendly names with IP addresses.

As the Internet expanded, particularly with the introduction of workstations and microcomputers, maintaining an up-to-date host file became increasingly labor-intensive and bandwidth-consuming. This challenge was addressed by the introduction of the Domain Name Service (DNS), described in RFC-882 among others, which offers a distributed database system to map names to addresses efficiently.

The chapter further unpacks the structure and functionality of domain names, explaining that they are hierarchical and tree-structured, with the root at the right end. For instance, “uxc.cso.uiuc.edu” represents a machine named ‘uxc’ within the University of Illinois at Urbana’s domain, denoted by ‘uiuc’, under the educational institutions’ domain ‘edu’. The process of resolving a domain name involves querying a series of servers, from root name servers down to the specific host, to obtain the possible IP addresses for communication.

Moreover, entities may apply for their own domain name, with the primary condition being the ability to maintain two Internet-reachable machines to serve as name servers for the domain. These servers, not required to be geographically co-located, facilitate the domain’s connectivity and management.

Lastly, the chapter introduces the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) Server, which implements the internet name server for UNIX systems. BIND, integrated with 4.3BSD, supports host name lookups, replacing the traditional “/etc/hosts” file, and continues to evolve with the Internet, offering a platform for reporting operational challenges and discussing future developments.

This overview encapsulates the process by which the Internet manages and resolves names, highlighting the evolution of domain name services and the ongoing innovations to support this crucial aspect of Internet architecture.