From: Ioannis Giotis (giotis@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 16 2004 - 22:53:37 PST
In the beginning, there was HOSTS.TXT. Then there was DNS. But HOSTS.TXT is
still here !!! It's true, it's in my windows dir...
DNS was built to address a serious issue that was becoming a problem as the
internet started spreading. The original system using hosts.txt, built like
many other solutions in those days, could not handle more users without
serious performance downgrade by the multiple transfers needed and
centralized management.
The motivation behind DNS is presented, which are basically the key points
to deal with hosts.txt problems. The authors present how DNS managed to
address these issues and more importantly allowed easier internet expansion.
There were really good ideas into DNS, which stand the test of time. Cashing
and decentralized management proved really useful and efficient. However, it
is really interesting that although one the main issues DNS tried to address
was scalability, DNS creators still managed to put some scaling limits that
now come back to haunt us. Also, it is clear today that a better naming
scheme could be used.
Overall, in the large number of scalability limitations imposed to us from
decisions in the early 80s, DNS rates really well. Most of the decisions
made addressed the issues well and still perform efficiently. A nice example
of good engineering that stands the test of time.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Tue Nov 16 2004 - 22:53:43 PST