DNS Name Notation and Message Compression

Obviously, the entire DNS protocol is oriented around dealing with names for domains, subdomains, and objects. As you've seen in the preceding topics, there are many fields in DNS messages and RRs that carry the names of objects, name servers, and so forth. DNS uses a special notation for encoding names in RRs and fields, a variation of this notation for email addresses, and a special compression method that reduces the size of messages for efficiency.

Standard DNS Name Notation

In Chapter 53, you learned how DNS names are constructed. Each node in the name hierarchy has a label associated with it. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for a particular device consists of the sequence of labels that starts ...

Get TCP/IP Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.