Name Service
When a user enters a command such as ping xena, one of the first things that must happen is translation of the hostname xena to an IP address. This can happen in one of two ways.
The IP address can be determined from the /etc/hosts file, or it can be resolved through a domain name service (DNS). For a small network, using just /etc/hosts is not a problem. For a larger network, trying to keep the /etc/hosts file in sync on all hosts can result in a great deal of work because these files must be exactly the same on each host. If the same address gets used on two different systems, the network could fail.
DNS relies on the named (pronounced name d) server to provide hostname-to-IP address translations. The named server is a host that ...
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