Naming and Name Resolution

The name resolution process is the process that locates a process by its name. The name resolution protocol (NRP) is an operating system’s method for resolving names into addresses so that processes can communicate with each other.

The NRP uses two different types of names:

• Domain names: These are strings of text used to identify hosts on the Internet or within your local network. For example, “www.google.com” represents a host called googlehost1 (the address for this particular host).
• IP addresses: These are four-letter codes that uniquely identify every device connected to an IP network; they’re usually written in a dotted-decimal format like “192.”
• The NRP uses both domain names and IP addresses to translate a name into an address. To find out how it does this, let’s look at the DNS system in more detail.
• DNS: The Domain Name System (DNS) is distributed data that maps domain names to IP addresses. It’s made up of hundreds of servers around the world that store records for millions of domains and serve those records to anyone who asks for them. When the user type “google.com” into the browser, it sends a query to one of these DNS servers asking “What’s the IP address for this domain?”
• The DNS server checks its records and replies with the address for googlehost1. The browser then makes a request to this address and receives a response from googlehost1, which displays the page user requested.
• This system works because the DNS servers use a domain name to find the IP address, rather than vice versa. This means that the user can’t simply enter an IP address into the browser’s address bar and expect it to work; instead, the user needs to enter the domain name of a website and let the DNS server find the IP address.

In this article, we’ll look at the communication structure of an operating system. It provides an interface between applications and other programs so that users can use them more easily. The hardware/software resources handled by an operating system include memory, keystrokes, disk accesses, CPU cycles, and bandwidth on main communication channels (e.g., TCP/IP).