Jun08
Meet Matt Larson, Part Two posted by Karen Snyder
Filed in: dns, Matt Larson
The term "domain" relates to the structure of the Namespace tree. But when you refer to a "zone," you need to know where the administrative boundaries are. You must know who delegates to whom and where they do that delegation. The entire Namespace is huge, and no single organization operates all of it. It must be sliced up into administrative boundaries so that different organizations can run different portions. So, a zone describes how the namespace is divided up for administrative purposes. The .com domain includes .com and everything below, but the .com zone does not include information below it. For example, the IP address of blogs.verisign.com is not in the .com zone.
Zones represent administrative boundaries that are created by delegation. Higher levels of the Namespace delegate authority to lower levels. For example, the root zone delegates authority to the .com zone which delegates authority to the 80 million names beneath it. The IP addresses hang off of the nodes of each domain name, and this information is not in the .com zone.
Want to hear more from Matt? Listen to his extremely informative (and rather entertaining) podcast "Ask Mr. DNS" that he records with his friend and co-DNS expert, Cricket Liu.
