From LQWiki

The DNS (Domain Name System) protocol is a distributed Internet directory database. It was designed to replace the task of manually maintaining hostname to IP address mappings in the hosts file, which was the way it was done when the Internet was still small. As the Internet grew, these hosts files became increasingly difficult to maintain, thus the DNS protocol was born.

DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control Internet email delivery. Most Internet services rely on DNS to work, and if DNS fails, web sites cannot be located and email delivery stalls.

Contents 1 DNS Server software 2 DNS query software 3 See also 4 External links

DNS Server software

• The most widely used server software for Linux is BIND, though others like dnsmasq (found at http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html ) and djbdns (found at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html ) are gaining in popularity due to their ease of use and higher built-in security.

• For those with dynamically allocated IP addresses, try DynDNS or no-ip.com which are service providers of dynamic DNS.

DNS query software

• dig
• nslookup
• host

See also

• BIND
• DNS configuration

External links

• BIND homepage (www.isc.org)
• dnsmasq homepage (www.thekelleys.org.uk)
• djbdns homepage (cr.yp.to)