ANYONE who has used the Internet has used the domain name system (DNS), however unwittingly. One of the most elegant of the technical fixes that makes the whole matrix work, DNS translates fairly human-friendly addresses like www.irishtimes.com into the numbers that machines prefer - 125.93.112.7, for example. It does this worldwide for every type of Net access and updates itself constantly to provide accurate information on an ever-changing network.
Fortunately, most of us don't need to know even this much about DNS. This book is for those who do - administrators of Net-connected networks and company intranets. Like a foraging duck, it takes a bottom-up approach. The reader is led through a good explanation of DNS and BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, "by far the most popular implementation of DNS today" as the background chapter puts it.)
There follows an ever more detailed progression into the concepts, the strategies and the line-by-line practicalities of making DNS available on a network. In keeping with the publisher's tradition, the information is comprehensive, even if the presentation is not as lucid or as witty as in some other Nutshell handbooks. There is some information on DNS under Windows. and on integrating DNS with Microsoft's Windows Internet Name Service, but the bias is towards Unix hosts and nameservers.