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DNS (domain name system) is a distributed, coherent, reliable, autonomous, hierarchical database, the first and only one of its kind. Created in the 1980s when the Internet was still young but overrunning its original system for translating host names into IP addresses, DNS is one of the foundation technologies that made the worldwide Internet (and the World Wide Web) possible. Yet this did not all happen smoothly, and DNS technology has been periodically refreshed and refined. Though it’s still possible to describe DNS in simple terms, the underlying details are by now quite sublime. This article explores the supposed and true definitions of DNS (both the system and the protocol) and shows some of the tension between these two definitions through the lens of the Internet protocol development philosophy.

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