Development of the Domain Name System

This paper describes the Domain Name System, which is the de-facto standard in Internet naming protocol. It describes the original goals of DNS, how it evolved and the design decisions behind DNS. Compared to other descriptions of DNS I have seen before, this paper focuses much more on the broader case of resource look up rather than the narrower sense of translating domain name into ip address. Unfortunately, some of these features such as multiple type and class did not see significant expansion even until today. This is not an isolated instance where systems were designed over generic.

In general, I liked this paper because it gave me a lot of historical perspective and the shortcoming and surprises that authors did not original expect. However, the description of DNS in this paper reads too much like a functional specification. A lack of typical usage pattern can cause some confusion for someone who is not very familar with DNS (me). In this respect, I find the second paper to be more helpful.