The Internet is becoming increasingly international, although the character set used by DNS and other core protocols hasn't kept up. One critical advance was made last year when the IETF published RFC 3490, which specifies the use of Internationalized Domain Names to display characters from foreign languages and alphabets.

As Internet technologies continue moving ever closer to center stage as the key elements of the corporate NOS platform, the need for a dynamic name-registration service is proving to be more pressing. This is particularly true as technologies such as DHCP become increasingly popular for automated address management. When addresses change daily, the host names linked to those addresses also must be changed daily if the names are to be relevant. Dynamic DNS solves this problem, but does so with extreme complexity.

Windows 2000 uses Dynamic DNS to add and delete resource records in DNS on the fly, letting Windows 2000 systems (or a DHCP server) modify host-name-to-address mappings dynamically without using NetBIOS queries. In addition, Active Directory systems use the DNS Service Location resource record for registering and locating the special-purpose servers, such as the Windows 2000 Active Directory domain controllers and catalog servers.

Domain Name Service (DNS) servers can provide a wealth of information about your network. They can show the number of nodes you have, the type of hardware and the operating system, the people responsible for those nodes and more. The information can be extraordinarily helpful to your internal systems management personnel. However, it also can be helpful to outsiders who shouldn't be privy to this information.

Managing large Domain Name Service (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers is a difficult and time-consuming task. Trying to keep these two services integrated together is even harder. Cisco's DNS/DHCP Manager provides a single interface to these separate services, making your network management chores considerably easier.

Administrators who are forced into prematurely deploying IP often ignore DNS, figuring that they can get by with using native IP addresses or relying on HOSTS files as a backup strategy. They'll get around to DNS 'one day.' Meanwhile, the number and variety of IP-enabled systems on the LAN will have multiplied, with the same number and variety of local HOSTS files on all of those systems. The time it will take to rewire these devices into DNS will far outweigh the time spent learning and correctly configuring a DNS service.