Our aim with this book is to help remedy this situation. We realize that not all of you have the time or the desire to become DNS experts. Most of you, after all, have plenty to do besides managing your zones and name servers: system administration, network engineering, or software development. It takes an awfully big institution to devote a whole person to DNS. We'll try to give you enough information to allow you to do what you need to do, whether that's running a small zone or managing a multinational monstrosity, tending a single name server or shepherding a hundred of them. Read as much as you need to know now, and come back later if you need to know more.

DNS is a big topic—big enough to require two authors, anyway—but we've tried to present it as sensibly and understandably as possible. The first two chapters give you a good theoretical overview and enough practical information to get by, and later chapters fill in the nitty-gritty details. We provide a roadmap up front to suggest a path through the book appropriate for your job or interest.

When we talk about actual DNS software, we'll concentrate on the Microsoft DNS Server, which is a popular implementation of the DNS specs included in Windows 2000 Server (and Windows NT Server 4.0 before it). We've tried to distill our experience in managing and maintaining zones into this book (One of our zones, incidentally, was once one of the largest on the Internet, but that was a long time ago.) 

We hope that this book will help you get acquainted with DNS on Windows 2000 if you're just starting out, refine your understanding if you're already familiar with it, and provide valuable insight and experience even if you know it like the back of your hand.