In this chapter, you will

• Learn about the Domain Name Service (DNS)

• Discover how to configure a DNS server

• Review the configuration of DNS clients

Although Solaris 9 has its own naming service, known as the Network Information Service (NIS), support is also provided for DNS, which maps IP addresses to hostnames. Every computer that is connected to the Internet must have an IP address, which identifies it uniquely within the network. For example, 192.18.97.241 is the IP address of the web server at Sun. IP addresses are hard for humans to remember, and don’t adequately describe the network on which a host resides. Thus, by examining the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of 192.18.97.241—www.sun.com—it’s immediately obvious that the host “www” lies within the “sun.com” domain. The mapping between human-friendly domain names and machine-friendly IP addresses is performed by a distributed naming service, known as the Domain Name Service (DNS). In this chapter, we examine how DNS servers manage records of network addresses, and how this information can be accessed by Solaris applications. In addition, we examine how to build and configure the latest version of the Berkeley Internet Daemon (BIND) from source, just in case security issues leave your existing Berkeley Internet Daemon (BIND) service vulnerable to attack.