HP-UX IP Address and Client Management Administrator's Guide HP-UX 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3

• “BIND Name Service Overview” (page 16)
• “BOOTP and TFTP Overview” (page 42)
• “DHCP Overview” (page 44)
• “DHCPv6 Overview” (page 47)
• “SLP Overview” (page 52)
BIND Name Service Overview
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is a Berkeley implementation of the Domain Name
System (DNS). It is a distributed network information lookup service that maps host names to
Internet addresses and maps Internet addresses to host names. It also facilitates Internet mail
routing by supplying a list of hosts that accept mail for other hosts. This section describes the
BIND features and components and how they work. It contains the following topics:
• “DNS Name Space” (page 16)
• “How BIND Works” (page 19)
• “How BIND Resolves Host Names” (page 20)
• “Benefits of Using BIND” (page 24)
• “BIND Configuration File” (page 24)
DNS Name Space
The DNS name space is a hierarchical organization of all the hosts on the Internet. It is a tree
structure, similar to the structure of UNIX® directories. The root of the hierarchy is represented
by a dot (.). Under the root, the top-level Internet domains com (commercial businesses), edu
(educational institutions), gov (government agencies), mil (military and defense), net
(network-related organizations), and org (other organizations) are included. Under each top-level
domain are subdomains. For example, the edu domain has subdomains like purdue, ukans,
and berkeley. In turn, each subdomain contains other subdomains. For example, the purdue
subdomain can contain econ, cs, and biol subdomains.
At the deepest level of hierarchy are the hosts, which are the leaves of the name space. A fully
qualified host name begins with the host’s canonical name and continues with a list of the
subdomains in the path from the host to the root of the name space. For example, the fully
qualified host name of the host arthur in the cs domain at Purdue University is
arthur.cs.purdue.edu.
Figure 1-1 shows the hierarchical structure of the DNS name space.
Figure 1-1 Structure of the DNS Name Space
16 Overview