DNS - Administration and delegation

DNS - Administration and delegation
	Chapter 2. Berkley Internet Name Daemons (BIND)

OK, we have now reviewed domains and sub-domains, next we will deal with how to administer DNS?

Is there some person responsible for the Internet DNS as a whole? No. There is an organization that is responsible for administering the use of domain names (and IP addresses too), but they could not possibly be responsible to maintaining the DNS for the entire Internet.

Apart from being a completely unmanageable job, it would also be very prone to breaking due to this central point of failure.

As a result, there is a system of delegation. In much the same way that all the computers may belong to your school, or company, while only a couple of machines are delegated as your responsibility, DNS is controlled by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and authority for your domain may well be assigned to your organization, ICANN having little to do with it's administration.

In order to manage the DNS hierarchy, ICANN delegate responsibility for your domain to another authority. This may be your organization, or, if you're too small or lack the technical expertise, it may be your Internet Service Provider (ISP). In my case, for example, my ISP administers my DNS, not because I lack the technical know-how, but due to the small number of hosts I have on my network, it would be more effort than it would be worth.

let's look at an example. Supposing my company were large and I control my DNS, I could subdivide my domain further. Perhaps I want to add two new sub-domains. Since sales people never listen to technical people ;-), I decide that I would want two new domains:

sales.QEDux.co.za and
tech.QEDux.co.za

Now we could have two web servers serving information relating to the sales department and the technical department.

Each server could be called "www", without fear of a clash of host names.

Since we have authority over this domain, we can simply configure our DNS to handle the new sub-domains without having to contact ICANN again.

This raises an important but subtle issue: that of domains and zones. We are learning in this module how to configure a name server (BIND being the software offering this service).

Name servers have complete "knowledge about" and "authority over" the sub-domain they have jurisdiction over and this sub-domain is referred to as a zone.

Some Examples of Zones

Thus if I start a name server containing all records for the domain QEDux.co.za, my name server will be said to have authority over the QEDux.co.za zone.

As a more complex example, the "gov.za" domain (which is actually a sub-domain of the "za" domain) may delegate authority for each of the regional governments. In this way, the City of Cape Town is responsible for their domain (capetown.gov.za) and the City of Johannesburg is responsible for their domain (joburg.gov.za).

Each of these regional governments have a "zone" for which they need to keep records. It would make no sense for the City of Cape Town to try to keep records for the City of Johannesburg. By delegating these responsibilities, the individuals and machines responsible for the "gov.za" domain only need keep records of who has responsibility for the capetown and joburg domains. They trust (rightly or wrongly) that Cape Town and Johannesburg will have the savvy to manage their own domain.

Zones in Summary

In sum then, a zone is a sub-domain for which a name server has a complete set of records (commonly these will be stored in a file on the name server).

What complicates this picture is the fact that some of the regional authorities may not have sufficient skills to maintain their own domain. In this case, the authorities responsible for the "gov.za" domain may administer this domain too. As a result, the zone for the "gov.za" will now include this regional information too.

The zone is thus not restricted to a domain. Figure 2.5 illustrates the zones for this hypothetical gov.za domain.

Figure 2.5. gov.za zones


A review of some theory on domains and sub-domains		Name resolution