DNS zone
A DNS zone is any distinct, contiguous portion of the domain name space in the Domain Name System (DNS) for which administrative responsibility has been delegated to a single manager.
Description
The domain name space of the Internet is organized into a hierarchical layout of subdomains below the DNS root domain. The individual domains of this tree may serve as delegation points for administrative authority and management. However, usually it is furthermore desirable to implement fine-grained boundaries of delegation, so that multiple sub-levels of a domain may be managed independently. Therefore, the domain name space is partitioned into areas (zones) for this purpose. A zone starts at a domain and extends downward in the tree to the leaf nodes or to the top-level of subdomains where other zones start.
A DNS zone is implemented in the configuration system of a domain name server. Historically, it is defined in the zone file, an operating system text file that starts with the special DNS record type Start of Authority (SOA) and contains all records for the resources described within the zone. This format was originally used by the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server (BIND) software package, and is defined in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.
See also
External links
- DNS zone @ Wikipedia
