IT278_Norris_Unit_8_Lab.docx What is DNS and DHCP? Purdue University Global What is DNS

IT278_Norris_Unit_8_Lab.docx  What is DNS and DHCP?  Purdue University Global  What is DNS and DHCP?  In network administration, the term DNS is commonly used and is an important term to understand as an administrator. DNS stands for Domain Name System and it is a hierarchical distributed database that maps logical host names to IP addresses. It is considered a distributed database since it does not hold all the information, instead its split between multiple servers. Microsoft uses the word “domain” in two ways, so its important to know which use of the word means what: one way is the administrative unit in Active Directory and the other is the name service that resolves fully qualified domain names into IP addresses.   Fully qualified domain names, FQDN for short, is a domain name that consists of the host name, subdomains and top-level domains. A fully qualified domain name looks like this “dcl.corp.northsim.com”. Breaking the domain name down, “dcl” would be the host name, “.corp.northsim” are the subdomains and the top domain would be the root of the internet “.com”. It is important to know that there is a period behind the top domain, even if its not visually there and thats what classifies it as top-level. Each time a period is crossed, a new domain is entered starting from top-level to second level to sublevel all the way down to the host name.  When configuring a network, a few tasks must be done like assign an IP, assign a subnet, define the default gateway router address and