The Australian National University
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

COMP3310 Computer Networks - year 2000
Assignment 3
Domain Name System

Deadline: 5.00pm Friday 9 June 2000

3 weeks overall

Estimated time: 12 hours

Value: 20% of marks for the unit

last modified: Monday 22 May 2.35pm

Acceptable degrees of collaboration

You are invited to discuss the topic with others. But note: collaboration has its limits.
Acceptable collaboration does not include writing up a report from someone else's research. You are required to perform the research yourself - and write it up yourself.

The topic

The Domain Name System is a widely used adjunct to the Internet, and provides a concrete form of management of the Internet namespace.
The purpose of this assignment is twofold:

  1. to present a technical description of the operation of the DNS
  2. to present a narrative description of the administration requirements and issues lying between administration, management and commercial operations associated with allocation and management of the Internet namespace.

The form of the assignment is a written report, including diagrams. The work to be done is in the realm of the three R's: Research, Reflection and Writing.

The overall aim is for you to be interesting and descriptive - not to parrot other tutorials; you should aim to interest the reader with novelty and well-supported statements of judgment, not merely dry facts.

Part 1 - technical

The technical description must include at least the operations involved in "cold" and "hot" lookup of a DNS query, including appropriate event diagrams (see lecture 22 for an example of the format - you need to extend this notation to illustrate the interaction of a number of servers in recursive query and caching).

For illustration, include cases where some of the intermediate cache references have been flushed from the cache (whether by time expiry or other administrative reasons).

Stay at the conceptual level as far as possible, but not too high level and airy-fairy. You should have some detail, but only small amounts of nitty detail where needed to illustrate the essentials. A fully technical low level description will get low marks, however correct it is (remember the trap of too much detail: "Beware the Turing tarpit!" - is a reminder that although every algorithm can be described by a Turing machine, but that is an incredibly uselessly detailed level of description for all practical purposes).

Part 2 - administrative

Describe the current administration of the Internet namespace as an organisation of authority and responsibility and a response to market forces. Include a historical approach and discuss the way in which the administration of the Internet namespace has dealt with the high rate of growth of the Internet - its "scalability".

Parameters

length
approx 2000 words
use of references (1)
no more than 20% of the report to be quoted material.
The descriptions must be in your own words to illustrate your understanding.
use of references (2)
all reference material must be properly attributed. There must be a list of items referenced (a bibliography) included. The only exception is the prescribed text, Tanenbaum.
use of reference material
be aware of the distinction between primary, authoritative sources (such as RFCs); authoritative descriptions (such as textbooks (usually); lightweight, unreliable descriptions (such as popular books), some Web pages; even lighter weight ephemera, such as newspapers; and very light weight, very unreliable sources such as USEnet newsgroups and some other Web pages.
These categories are not hard-edged - there are some reliable newsgroups, particularly moderated ones, and there are some mistakes, oversimplifications, and errors in textbooks.
In all cases a full citation must be made (authors, title, date, source and page numbers if in a larger work.
For a WWW reference or USEnet, a URL - and some explanatory text to clarify the source (e.g. not merely a URL for a Web page, but the title of the item should be given)

References

Obviously the World Wide Web contains some useful material, particularly for recent developments on the administrative and management side. But tutorial and technical descriptions are better found in books.
See the unit bookshelf, especially for basic links to primary material such as the relevant RFCs and the root of the current administrative setup (you need to go beyond these to find the discussions of why it is this way - and what alternatives are argued for).
Consult the textbook by Tanenbaum, and the recommended reference by Sidnie Feit "TCP/IP" (which is a better reference than Tanenbaum on this subject).

See also:

Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu
DNS and BIND, 3rd Edition, O'Reilly, September 1998 ISBN 1-56592-512-2.
with a sample chapter called How Does DNS Work?
Further references may be posted to the talk newsgroup - but don't give away all your research to anyone else! (see Acceptable Collaboration above)

Submission and presentation

Submit a cleanly printed and diagrammed version on paper to the assignment box. Presentation (including spelling) will be taken into account - use the spelling checker (there is even one in emacs.
Any word processing software (including ASCII plain text) is acceptable, but you should pay attention to headings, paragraphs and organisation into sections. Your submission must demonstrate your ability to communicate as well as your ability to research and describe technical material.
Chris Johnson