The Domain Name Ecosystem
A long time ago, on my first day of college at the Music Industry Arts school at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, our recording engineering teacher-to-be told us:
As it turned out, there was a trick to rolling microphone cables that I did not know, which was why until then all my cables always gnarled into twisted, random barbs of spaghetti in my gig bag. But after I learned "the trick," all my cables henceforth fell into ordered, neat, clean loops, and remained that way, even after transport. It was worth the price of admission to college.
This chapter is the "learning to unplug and then roll a microphone cable" of naming. We're going to get an overview of important aspects of naming beyond your own network and outside your own domain's nameservers. We're going to do this because it is necessary to have this knowledge in hand and have processes within your own organization to manage these functions of the names you are responsible for. If you don't, then you can do everything else in this book, from setting up your nameservers, to cluefully selecting an outsourced vendor, to defending against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks absolutely correctly, and with flawless execution, yet still find yourself experiencing a catastrophic outage because of something from outside your operations that affected a key domain name.
We'll start by taking a high-level overview of a domain name itself and breaking it into logical components that have different meanings and, with that, different implications.
By the end of this chapter, you should have a greater understanding of the overall workings and life cycles of your domain names, from inception (registration), through resolution (nameservers), to death (expiry), than many IT professionals have
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Why domains are important
- Domain names 101
- Anatomy of a domain name
- Understanding the domain name expiry cycle