Book Image

Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS

By : Mark E.Jeftovic
Book Image

Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS

By: Mark E.Jeftovic

Overview of this book

Managing your organization's naming architecture and mitigating risks within complex naming environments is very important. This book will go beyond looking at “how to run a name server” or “how to DNSSEC sign a domain”, Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS looks across the entire spectrum of naming; from external factors that exert influence on your domains to all the internal factors to consider when operating your DNS. The readers are taken on a comprehensive guided tour through the world of naming: from understanding the role of registrars and how they interact with registries, to what exactly is it that ICANN does anyway? Once the prerequisite knowledge of the domain name ecosystem is acquired, the readers are taken through all aspects of DNS operations. Whether your organization operates its own nameservers or utilizes an outsourced vendor, or both, we examine the complex web of interlocking factors that must be taken into account but are too frequently overlooked. By the end of this book, our readers will have an end to end to understanding of all the aspects covered in DNS name servers.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
7
Types and Uses of Common Resource Records

A Tale of Two Nameservers

As distinct from various nameserver daemons, software, or appliances (which we'll look at later in Chapter 8, Quasi-Record Types), nameservers can be typed into two broad categories defined by what kind of function they are fulfilling.

Most of the issues we examine in this book are concerned with running DNS operations for a portfolio of domain names and making sure that anybody and anything that queries our domain names always, reliably, obtains a valid response. Doing that involves both main types of nameservers.

The two main functional variations are as follows:

  • Resolvers or recursors
  • Authoritative nameservers

Resolvers or recursors make DNS queries on behalf of their clients and relay the responses back to those clients.

Authoritative nameservers hold zone data for their client domains or zones and reply to queries coming in for those zones...