The DNS problem

[Horacio T. Cadiz]

On 08/21/2012 10:38 PM, Carl Smith wrote:
> The DNS problem and reason for confusion is due to limitations imposed during
> the infancy of development stages of machine inter-connectivity. Basically, IP
> is insufficient to grant each machine a unique identity. The limited IP
> addresses are licensed to master networks which in turn are sub-netted to
> machines which only have a local identity slaved to the master.

   This is not entirely accurate. The DNS issue is separate
from the IP address issue.

   There were (when the DARPA net started)
enough IP addresses to grant each machine a unique IP
address.  The IP address depletion only started in the
early 90s during the Internet boom. The CIDR, network
address translation (NAT), and other techniques were
then used to forestall the problem of address depletion.
Now, with IPV6, there are more than enough IP addresses
to assign to anything you can think of (I exaggerate of
course, slightly).

   The DNS was not in response to the limited number of
IP addresses. The DNS is a mechanism for giving names to
IP addresses because, unless you are at MIT, we prefer to
refer to things by names (often implying a function or
a characteristic) rather than numbers.  It is easier to
say "download the file from 'server'" than "download the
file from 165.220.3.1." We remember names better than numbers,
specially long arbitrary string of numbers.  Of course,
there are other benefits like giving the same name
to set of different IP addresses to create a simple
redundancy of services from the set of machines.

   The creation of domain names is just a way of
making sure that there are no collisions in the names.
With domain names, the "server" in your network can be
differentiated from "server" in my network. This allows
the different domains to name their machines independently
of other domains.

   The Internet will work even without DNS.

   As long as we can remember the IP address of our
favorite sites and they don't change their IP addresses,
and ... I don't think there'd be much of a
problem.  B-)


--
Bombim Cadiz
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