Domain Name Service Defined

Network naming services were developed to overcome the obstacle of humans having to remember complex computerized addresses. The DNS is a distributed database indexed by domain names. Recall that each domain name exists as a path in a large inverted tree, the domain namespace. The structure of this tree is hierarchical.

All DNS implementations adhere to a specific set of criteria:

  • Each node in the tree has a text label that can be up to 63 characters long.

  • The root of the tree is labeled with a zero-length name.

  • The full name of any node in the tree is the path from the node to the root, using the text labels separated by a dot. When the root node's label is printed, it appears as the name of the node, ending with a ...

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