RFC 1034 (rfc1034) - Page 2 of 55

Domain names - concepts and facilities

RFC 1034             Domain Concepts and Facilities        November 1987


     bandwidth consumed in distributing a new version by this
     scheme is proportional to the square of the number of hosts in
     the network, and even when multiple levels of FTP are used,
     the outgoing FTP load on the NIC host is considerable.
     Explosive growth in the number of hosts didn't bode well for
     the future.

   - The network population was also changing in character.  The
     timeshared hosts that made up the original ARPANET were being
     replaced with local networks of workstations.  Local
     organizations were administering their own names and
     addresses, but had to wait for the NIC to change HOSTS.TXT to
     make changes visible to the Internet at large.  Organizations
     also wanted some local structure on the name space.

   - The applications on the Internet were getting more
     sophisticated and creating a need for general purpose name
     service.


The result was several ideas about name spaces and their management
[IEN-116, RFC-799, RFC-819, RFC-830].  The proposals varied, but a
common thread was the idea of a hierarchical name space, with the
hierarchy roughly corresponding to organizational structure, and names
using "."  as the character to mark the boundary between hierarchy
levels.  A design using a distributed database and generalized resources
was described in [RFC-882, RFC-883].  Based on experience with several
implementations, the system evolved into the scheme described in this
memo.

The terms "domain" or "domain name" are used in many contexts beyond the
DNS described here.  Very often, the term domain name is used to refer
to a name with structure indicated by dots, but no relation to the DNS.
This is particularly true in mail addressing [Quarterman 86].

2.2. DNS design goals

The design goals of the DNS influence its structure.  They are:

   - The primary goal is a consistent name space which will be used
     for referring to resources.  In order to avoid the problems
     caused by ad hoc encodings, names should not be required to
     contain network identifiers, addresses, routes, or similar
     information as part of the name.

   - The sheer size of the database and frequency of updates
     suggest that it must be maintained in a distributed manner,
     with local caching to improve performance.  Approaches that



Mockapetris