Host Names for Network Devices

Each unique IP address can have an associated host name. DNS uses a hierarchical scheme for establishing host names for network nodes. This allows local control of the segments of the network through a client-server scheme. The DNS system can locate a network device by translating the host name of the device into its associated IP address.

Domains Names for Groups of Networks

IP defines a naming scheme that allows a device to be identified by its location in the IP. This is a hierarchical naming scheme that provides for domains. On the Internet, a domain is a portion of the naming hierarchy tree that refers to general groupings of networks based on organization type or geography. Domain names are pieced together with periods (.) as the delimiting characters. For example, Cisco is a commercial organization that the IP identifies by a com domain name, so its domain name is cisco.com. A specific device in this domain, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) system, for example, is identified as ftp.cisco.com.

Name Servers

To keep track of domain names, IP has defined the concept of a name server. Name servers are programs that have complete information about their namespace portion of the domain tree and may also contain pointers to other name servers that can be used to lead to information from any other part of the domain tree. Name servers know the parts of the domain tree for which they have complete information. A name server may also store information about other parts of the domain tree. To map domain names to IP addresses, you must first identify the host names, then specify a name server, and enable the DNS service.

Cache

To speed the process of converting names to addresses, the name server maintains a database, called a cache, of host name-to-address mappings for use by the connect, telnet, and ping EXEC commands, and related Telnet support operations. The cache stores the results from previous responses. Upon receiving a client-issued DNS query, it will check this local storage to see if the answer is available locally.

Name Resolvers

Name resolvers are programs that extract information from name servers in response to client requests. Resolvers must be able to access at least one name server. The resolver either uses that name server's information to answer a query directly or pursues the query using referrals to other names servers. A resolver will typically be a system routine that is directly accessible to user programs. Therefore, no protocol is necessary between the resolver and the user program.

Zones

The domain namespace is divided into areas called zones that are points of delegation in the DNS tree. A zone contains all domains from a certain point downward, except those for which other zones are authoritative.

Authoritative Name Servers

A name server is said to be an authority for the parts of the domain tree for which it has complete information. A zone usually has an authoritative name server, often more than one. An authoritative name server has been configured with host table information or has acquired host table information though a zone transfer (the action that occurs when a secondary DNS server starts up and updates itself from the primary server).

DNS Operation

Within an organization, you can have many name servers, but Internet clients can query only those that the root name servers know. The other name servers answer internal queries only.

A name server handles client-issued queries to the DNS server for locally defined hosts within a particular zone as follows:

• An authoritative name server responds to DNS user queries for a domain name that is under its zone of authority by using the permanent and cached entries in its own host table. If the query is for a domain name that is under its zone of authority but for which it does not have any configuration information, the authoritative name server simply replies that no such information exists..
• A name server that is not configured as the authoritative name server responds to DNS user queries by using information that it has cached from previously received query responses. If no router is configured as the authoritative name server for a zone, queries to the DNS server for locally defined hosts will receive nonauthoritative responses.

Name servers answer DNS queries (forward incoming DNS queries or resolve internally generated DNS queries) according to the forwarding and lookup parameters configured for the specific domain.

Perform this task to associate host names with IP addresses.

A name server is used to keep track of information associated with domain names. A name server can maintain a database of host name-to-address mappings. Each name can map to one or more IP addresses. In order to use this service to map domain names to IP addresses, you must specify a name server.

Perform this task to customize your DNS configuration.

In a multiple server configuration without the DNS round-robin functionality, many programs will use the first host server/IP address for the whole time to live (TTL) of the cache while using the second and third host servers/IP addresses only in the event of host failure. This behavior presents a problem when a high volume of users all arrive at the first host during the TTL time. For example, the network access server (NAS) sends out a DNS query; the DNS servers reply with a list of the configured IP addresses to the NAS. The NAS then caches these IP addresses for a given time (for example, five minutes). All users that dial in during the five minute TTL time will land on one host, the first IP address in the list.

In a multiple server configuration with the DNS round-robin functionality, the DNS server returns the IP address of all hosts to rotate between the cache of host names. During the TTL of the cache, users are distributed among the hosts. This functionality distributes calls across the configured hosts and reduces the amount of DNS queries.

Perform this task to disable DNS queries for ISO CLNS addresses.

If your router has both IP and ISO Connectionless Network Service (ISO CLNS) enabled and you want to use ISO CLNS network service access point (NSAP) addresses, you can use the DNS to query these addresses, as documented in RFC 1348. This feature is enabled by default.

Perform this task to verify your DNS configuration.

1. enable
2. ping hosts
3. show hosts

The following example establishes a domain list with several alternate domain names:

ip domain list csi.com
ip domain list telecomprog.edu
ip domain list merit.edu

The following example configures the host name-to-address mapping process. IP DNS-based translation is specified, the addresses of the name servers are specified, and the default domain name is given.

! IP DNS-based host name-to-address translation is enabled
ip domain lookup
! Specifies hosts 192.168.1.111 and 192.168.1.2 as name servers
ip name-server 192.168.1.111 192.168.1.2
! Defines cisco.com as the default domain name the router uses to complete
! Set the name for unqualified host names
ip domain name cisco.com

The following example allows a Telnet to company.example.com to connect to each of the three IP addresses specified in the following order: the first time the hostname is referenced, it would connect to 10.0.0.1; the second time the hostname is referenced, it would connect to 10.1.0.1; and the third time the hostname is referenced, it would connect to 10.2.0.1. In each case, the other two addresses would also be tried if the first one failed; this is the normal operation of the Telnet command.

Router(config)# ip host company.example.com 10.0.0.1 10.1.0.1 10.2.0.1
Router(config)# ip domain round-robin