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DNS Notes

DNS Notes in Cloud Computing Class

Hongji Shi  included in Class Notes
   562 words   3 minutes 

DNS

There’re two ways to identify a host — by a hostname and by a IP address. People prefer the more mnemonic hostname identifier, while routers prefer fixed-length, hierarchically structured IP addresses.

What is DNS

DNS, domain name system is the networking system that allows us to resolve human-friendly names to unique id addresses. DNS is a globally distributed, stateless, scalable, reliable database.

  • a distributed database implemented in a hierarchy of DNS servers
  • an application-layer protocol that allows the host to query the distributed database
  • DNS protocol runs over UDP protocol and uses port 53

DNS components

  • name space
  • name servers
  • resolvers

Name space

The name space is the structure of DNS database. It’s an inverted tree with the root node at the top. Each node has a label, the root node has a null label written as ..

labels and domain names

A label is a string up to 63 bytes. A domain name is a sequence of labels from node to the root, separate by ., read from left to right.

Domain names are limited to 255 characters in length.

Top-level domain, TLD, is the furthest portion to the right, the most general part of the domain.

  • gTLD, generic top-level domain, .com, .edu. .gov…
  • ccTLD, country code, .cn, .fr, .uk…

Name servers

The domain name hierarchy exists only in abstract. It’s implemented by name servers.

  • run the software (BIND, BIND 9, NSD) which receive and respond to DNS queries
  • name servers store the information about name space in units called zone
  • Usually, one or more name servers are authoritative for the same zone ensuring redundancy and load balancing
  • A single name server may be authoritative for many zones

There’re two main types of name servers

  • Authoritative — maintains the data
    • Primary — where the data is edited
    • Secondary — where the data is replicated

DNS recourse records types

Each name server implements the zone information in collection of recourse records. A recourse record is a 5-tuple contains the following fields: (Name, Value, Class, Type, TTL)

Type field specifies how the value should be interpreted

  • A: IPv4 address
  • AAAA: IPv6 address
  • CAA: specify which certificate authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates for a domain or subdomain
  • CNAME: the same format as a domain name
  • MX: a main exchanger, specify a mail server responsible for accepting emails on behalf of recipients’ domain
  • NS: identify the name server for the hosted zone
  • SOA: start of authority record, provides information about a domain and the corresponding zone

TTL, time to live, the amount of time, in seconds, that you want DNS recursive resolvers to cache information about this recourse record set.

Name resolution

Name resolution is the process by which resolvers and the name space servers cooperate to find data in the name space.

A DNS query has three parameters:

  • A domain name
  • A class (IN)
  • A type (e.g., A)

Upon receiving a query from a resolver, a name server will

  1. look for answer in its authoritative data and cache
  2. if step 1 fails, the answer must be looked up

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DNS Related Outages:

References

Updated on 2024-03-17
 Network
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