Introduction To DNS, DHCP and APIPA

Sailesh Paudel

Cloud Computing For Big Data (CCBT), Lambton College

ITP 2123_2: Server Admin I

Linchen Wang

October 31, 2021

 Abstract

The communication between millions of devices for sharing of data, files and information has
been possible with the advent of computer networking and internet. The internet which was born to
establish secure communication for the use of Department of Defense (DOD) now has become integral
part of our life. Its existence itself is possible because of various protocols, rules, and architectures
defined and constructed to seamlessly integrate the various part of networking required to make the
communication in internet possible. Some of these important protocols are TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, DHCP,
ARP, ICMP, POP, etc. and many more. In this research, the concept of DHCP, DNS and APIPA are briefly
introduced in easy-to-understand way and their uses in the networking as well are covered. DHCP and
APIPA are concerned with providing network information containing unique network identifier to the
device called IP address whereas as DNS is related to the resolution of generic hostname like
www.google.com to its corresponding IP address, for the machine to read and use easily.

Introduction of DHCP

Each device on the internet is required a unique identifier to communicate between each device to
other. This requirement is fulfilled using IP (Internet Protocol) address. There are in general two ways in
which a device can be assigned an IP address. First one is manual where we must plan on every device
that is going to be included in the network, calculate IP address for each of them and manually assigning
the static IP address for all the devices. Another method is using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol) server to automatically assign IP address to the existing device or the device that may be
connected in the future. DHCP is a client-server-based protocol which is used to automatically assign IP
address to the devices connected in the network. It assigns all the required information like IP address,
subnet mask, default-gateway, and DNS server to the device. The dynamic IP assignment to the client
device by DHCP server is executed in four steps as shown below.

1. DHCP Discover: Client device sends the broadcast packets in the network which is responded by
the DHCP server and are ignored by other devices.
2. DHCP Offer: After getting the request packet, DHCP server searches for the available IP address
from its IP pool and responds to the client with information that contains IP address, subnet
mask, default gateway and DNS server
3. DHCP Request: Client device then sends DHCP Request packets to DHCP server that it has
received the information and is it okay to use them
4. DHCP Acknowledgement: DHCP server sends acknowledgement packets to verify request from
client.
Dynamic IP assignment using DHCP is chosen over Static IP assignment is due to its reliable and
accurate IP management system. In static addressing, each device is provided a permanent IP
address and if there are a lot of devices in network, it will be tedious job to manually assign each
IP on each device. Sometime due to IP conflict, the error may arise. But these problems are all
mitigated using DHCP, which not only provides IP addresses to each device on real-time but also
returns the assigned IP to its pool if the client is offline or the lease time exceeds out and that IP
address can be reused by some other device.

Introduction of Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA)

It is the feature executed in network client, having Windows operating system as the backup
plan when the default DHCP server is unreachable, and the client is unable to get IP address
dynamically from DHCP. In this case the client address is automatically given IP address from
range 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254 with subnet mask 255.255.0.0. The IP address provided
by APIPA to client is still unique for that network because it uses ARP protocol to confirm that
the assigned IP address is not used by other clients. It also continually searches for DHCP server
in every five minutes and if it discovers DHCP server, it allows the DCP server to replace the
APIPA with the addressing information from DHCP.
APIPA assumes the role of network information assignment to the devices connected in network
when DHCP is unreachable and fails to provide the required network information. It is done so
that the devices connected in the same network can still communicate with each other and
share files if they are within the same range of IP address. Since the IP assigned by APIPA is
unique to each device in the network there is no conflict in its address and the reliable
communication can happen between devices over TCP/IP.
 Introduction of Domain Name System (DNS)
The DNS is a network protocol that translates the human readable domain name like
www.google.com to machine readable IP address like 172.217.13.164. All the devices connected
to the internet have unique IP address which are 32-bit long and are used to uniquely identify
the device on the network. Compared to past, these days there are a lot of devices connected to
the network and a lot of web services and webpages are available at present. They all have their
unique IP addresses. But we humans cannot memorize these series of number, so the concept
of DNS was introduced. When we open browser and type web address like www.google.com,
the DNS request is sent by web browser to the DNS server, that is predefined manually along
with other network information like IP address, subnet mask and default gateway in manual IP
configuration or provided dynamically by the DHCP server. The DNS server that looks up its
database, translates the domain name into its corresponding IP address and responds back with
translated address to the request sender. The browser now can send the web request using the
IP address to get the desired webpage.
The characteristic of DNS is distributed and hierarchical in nature where at the top level there
are 13 top level generic name servers like .com, .org, etc. And below them in the hierarchy are
second level domain and so on. Each root name server has information on its own domain
extension eg. .com has name server information for domain names that contains .com at the
end. That’s why any individual name server does not contains information for all domain names
and usually communicates with each other for the information it lacks.
There are three types of DNS
1. DNS Queries
 Recursive
 Iterative
 Non-recursive
2. DNS Servers
 DNS Resolver
 DNS Root Server
 Authoritative Name Server
3. DNS Records
 Address mapping record
 IPv6 address record
  Canonical name record, etc.

DNS zone is the part of the domain namespace which is responsible for maintaining DNS zone in literal
way and are managed by some legal entities like organization or company. Each DNS server does not
contain data on all domain names and are maintained by different top level name servers at each
hierarchical level. For eg. .com, .org, .gov are top level domain nameservers, which contains information
on domain names with .com, .org, and .gov respectively. These separate nameservers can be viewed as
different zone. Similarly, second level domain and sub domain define each zone. Authoritative zone
refers to the zone for the server from where it can respond to queries referencing to its own data and
without relying on other servers. There are two types in the authoritative zone:

 Primary zone: It stores the original copy of the record

 Secondary zone: It stores the duplicate and read-only copy of the record

References

1. https://www.baeldung.com/cs/dhcp-intro
2. https://networklessons.com/cisco/ccie-routing-switching/introduction-to-dhcp
3. https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Automatic-Private-IP-Addressing-APIPA
4. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-apipa-automatic-private-ip-addressing/
5. https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/cisco/automatic-private-ip-
addressing-apipa/
6. https://www.educba.com/dns-types/
7. https://ns1.com/resources/dns-zones-explained