Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

DNS Hierarchy

The hierarchy and naming conventions operate in a similar way to the UNIX filesystem. Because of this, it's often easier to explain it by comparing the two, which is exactly what we'll do here.

Domain Name Space

Let's start with the Domain Name Space, which we can think of as being all the machines (yes, even PCs!) that are connected to the Internet. It's represented as a hierarchy, much like the inverted tree layout of the UNIX filesystem. The branches of the tree represent domains and subdomains instead of the directories and subdirectories of the UNIX tree. The leaves of the tree represent actual machines rather than the files of the UNIX tree. There is also a root entry, represented by a dot (.) in DNS, which is the parent of ...