Domain Name Services, or DNS, are used to, amongst other things, translate a URL (www.example.com) to an IP address (192.168.145.1). In that, it is kind of like the phone book (contact list) on your phone. Most people just look for the entry for “jane”, they don't actually know her phone number.

There are several DNS servers available, and for special purposes, some are much better than BIND, which is possibly the most widely used (and possibly oldest) name server. All of our documentation will concentrate on BIND. It is available on all Unix platforms.