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What is A-Record?

A-Record: Here, we are going to learn about the A-Record – what is A-Record, what does A-Record stands for?
Submitted by Anushree Goswami, on April 27, 2020

A-Record: Address Record

A record is an abbreviation of an "Address Record".

It is also termed as Domain Name System (DNS) record. It is a naming record system in the form of hierarchy and decentralization for computers, services, or further supplies associated with the Internet or a private network and which passes on the liability of allotting domain names and mapping those names to Internet resources by delegating trustworthy and reliable name servers for each domain. It joins together a variety of information with domain names allotted to each of the partaking entities. Most significantly, it converts further readily learned domain names to the numerical IP addresses required for placing and categorizing computer facilities and devices with the fundamental protocols of the network.

The Domain Name System also denotes the methodological functionality of the database service that is at its foundation. It describes the DNS protocol, a comprehensive arrangement and design of the data structures and data communication exchanges used in the DNS, as the division of the Internet Protocol Suite.

The most widespread categories of records stored in the DNS database comprise:

• Start of Authority (SOA)
• IP addresses (A and AAAA)
• SMTP mail exchangers (MX)
• Name servers (NS)
• Pointers for reverse DNS lookups (PTR)
• Domain name aliases (CNAME)

History

• The primary ARPANET directory was designed, created and maintained by Elizabeth Feinler.
• At the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Jon Postel handled the maintenance of numerical addresses, called the Assigned Numbers List. His team functioned and operated very much close with SRI.
• By the beginning of the 1980s, keeping up a distinct, centralized host table had turned out to be deliberate and unmanageable and the rising network needed an automated naming system to address methodological and personnel concerns.
• In 1984, four UC Berkeley students, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server execution for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, universally alluded to as BIND.
• In 1985, Kevin Dunlap of DEC considerably modified and enhanced the DNS execution.
• At the beginning of the 1990s, BIND was ported to the Windows NT platform. It was extensively distributed, particularly on Unix systems, and is still the highly extensively used DNS software on the Internet.
• In November 1987, RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 outdated the 1983 DNS designs and arrangements. Many supplementary requirements for comments have projected extensions to the central part of DNS protocols.