Proc. of the IFIP WG 6.5 working conference on Computer-based message services
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Computer Networks
Elements of Networking Style
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The implementation of domain nameservice in a certain campus subdomain of the ARPA Internet has lead to several questions on the part of the local user community. This paper answers some of them. It describes the purpose of Internet domains and nameservers, how domains and networks are related, and the historical reasons for the existence of domains. There is a summary of the protocols nameservers use and of how they are implemented. Then the paper describes the logistics of how nameservers are used in a campus environment, first from the user's point of view, then from the administrators. Issues of the utility or necessity of subdomains of the campus domain are addressed. Finally, mailbox binding is treated: this is a potential use of the nameservers to provide a campus-wide distributed database of personal human names and their mappings into network host addresses.