Development of the Domain Name System

This paper is a good introduction paper on the domain name system and it talks about the purpose of the domain name system and what they had in mind when they were developing the domain name system. With the DARPA net, centralized management of anything seemed to be a bad idea, since the purpose was fault tolerance. Thus, DNS was designed so there was no central management, but instead a distributed system of matching names to hosts. It worked by establishing records, and whenever a host needs to do a lookup, it can look it up locally first, and then the requests can move up to the different root servers. The namespace is also split into different zones, to spread out the distribution even more.

In the paper it mentioned the current implementation status, and how applications had to be recompiled to convert from the old HOSTS.TXT to DNS. It seems now DNS is the standard and maybe the only way to do domain name lookup, i wonder if all the applications converted successfully, or does HOSTS.TXT still exist and is being used only by a small portion of the users on the internet.