RHEL Linux - Red Hat System Administration Practice Exam

_____ is a distributed network of servers that maps host names to IP addresses.

1. HTTP

2. DNS

3. NAT

4. SMTP

The correct answer is: DNS

The correct answer is DNS, which stands for Domain Name System. It plays a crucial role in the functionality of the internet by translating human-friendly domain names, like www.example.com, into machine-readable IP addresses, such as 192.0.2.1. This process is essential because while users prefer to remember easy-to-read names, computers and networking equipment rely on numerical IP addresses to identify and communicate with each other. DNS is structured as a distributed network of servers, meaning that the information about domain names and their corresponding IP addresses is not stored in one central location but is instead distributed across various servers worldwide. This decentralization helps ensure redundancy and reliability of name resolution services, as multiple DNS servers can respond to requests from clients. In the context of the other options, while HTTP is a protocol used for transferring hypertext over the web, NAT (Network Address Translation) is used for enabling devices on a local network to access the internet using a single public IP address. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is specifically designed for sending emails. None of these options fulfill the role of mapping host names to IP addresses, which is the defining function of DNS.