Overview

Secrets in This Chapter

• Using the Domain Name System (DNS)

• Understanding Hierarchical Domain Names

• Learning More about DNS and BIND

• Understanding named-the BIND Name Server

• Configuring the Resolver

• Examining the /etc/named.conf File

• Understanding Resource Record (RR) Format

• Using Network Information Service (NIS)

• Setting the NIS Domain Name

• Configuring the Master NIS Server

Domain Name System (DNS) is an Internet service that converts a fully qualified domain name, such as www.redhat.com, into its corresponding IP address. You can think of DNS as the directory of Internet hosts-DNS is what enables you to refer to a host by its name even though TCP/IP requires IP addresses for data transfers. DNS is implemented by a hierarchy of distributed DNS servers. This chapter provides an overview of DNS and shows you how to set up a caching DNS server on your Red Hat Linux system.

Network Information System (NIS) is a client/server service designed to manage information shared among several host computers on a network. Typically, NIS is used on UNIX (and Linux) systems to maintain a common set of user accounts and other system files for a group of hosts. This, among other things, enables a user to log in on all hosts with the same user name and password. This chapter describes the NIS client and server software and shows you how to use them on a Red Hat Linux system.