DNS Server Configuration Process

Here is the correct order of the steps necessary to configure a DNS server:

1. Gather information
2. Prepare the zone files
3. Kill the name server process
4. Prepare the named.boot file
5. Start the name server process
6. Run nslookup
7. Configure the DNS clients
8. Troubleshoot DNS problems

The Domain Name System (DNS), which was developed in the early 1980s, provides a way of associating alphanumeric names, which are easier for humans to use, with the numerical addresses that designate every location on the Internet. The system of DNS servers distributed across the Internet invisibly converts the names, serving as signposts in cyberspace into the numerical addresses required by network routers to reach the signposted locations. The mnemonic quality of domain names became a practical necessity when the rapid increase in the use of e-mail and the World Wide Web (Web) caused the number of Internet users and uses to increase tremendously. Web sites often became known to their visitors by their distinctive domain names for example, 1) cplusoop.com or 2) gofpatterns.com
Carefully chosen domain names often enabled a searcher to navigate to a site simply by guessing (e.g., www.un.org). Consequently, those signposts gained economic, social, cultural, and political value and they became the objects of pride, competition, and dispute. It was fitting, therefore, that the DNS also provided the name the Dot Com Era for the period of the 1990s when dot com fever drove frenzied efforts to stake out and exploit virtually every potentially valuable site on the Web. Inevitably, such efforts led to intense conflicts, especially disputes involving trademarks, which provided the impetus for the 1998 congressional mandate to initiate this study . However, the passage of time, the rapid evolution of the Internet and the DNS, the additional and differing interests of the funding agencies, and the logic of the committee's charter have resulted in a report whose scope differs in some respects from the original congressional request, but is as a result more responsive to the current interests of the report's sponsors and audience.