From: Tom Christiansen (tomchr@ee.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 17 2004 - 16:26:05 PST
> >This is a historical perspective paper which describes the motivation
> >behind the development of the DNS. In The Good Old Days, a list of domain
> >names were maintained in form of a HOSTS.TXT file. This file was present
> >on all hosts in the internet and was managed from a central point (at SRI
> >Network Information Center). Needless to say, as the number of hosts on
> >the Internet grew, so did the need for a different system. The biggest
> >change was to make the system distributed. In addition, the main
> >requirements involved that the system should be OS independent and have at
> >least the same functionality as the old HOSTS.TXT system. The DNS should
> >also have no obvious limits for the size of names. Four years after the
> >development of DNS, the DNS name list contained about four times the
> >number of entries as the HOSTS.TXT did. This is some measure of success.
> >
> >The paper mentions some issues regarding look-ups of names that don't
> >exist. A majority of these look-ups are caused by users on other
> >internetworks trying to see if a particular name is accessible through the
> >Internet. If the name formats for the different internetworks was
> >different it would have been simple to set up a filter to eliminate the
> >unwanted queries. Maybe this wasn't the case, who knows...
> >
> >It is interesting to note that the fundamental structure of DNS naming has
> >not changed. It's still a hierarchical structure. The TLD naming (.com,
> >.edu, .mil, etc) has not changed either, although, new ones have been
> >added as needed.
> >Another interesting point is that many of the programs, protocols (MX,
> >BIND, etc) mentioned in this article are still in use. Linux even supports
> >the HOSTS.TXT system - highly usable on small local networks.
> >
> >The notion that documentation should be written with the assumption that
> >only the examples will be read is dead on.
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