A unifying framework for intelligent DNS management

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a special kind of distributed directory service for people to create and access the network information systems by (1) allowing local control of its segments and (2) making each segment's data available on the Internet using a client-server scheme. However, few administrators have the expertise to do the jobs well since this distributed mechanism is a double-edged sword; it allows DNS not only to scale to Internet size but also allows for incredible mis-configurations. The presented study is an analysis of what problems and difficulties most DNS administrators might encounter and provides the insights into how various DNS assistant sub-systems could be designed and deployed to solve the complex problems or alleviate these DNS administration job loadings. Ontologies become an important mechanism to build information systems. The role of ontologies is to capture domain knowledge and provide a commonly agreed upon understanding of a domain. The advantages include the sharing and re-use of knowledge, and the better engineering of knowledge-based systems with respect to acquisition, verification and maintenance. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework (e.g. including configuration, outstanding traffic monitoring and analysis, planning and management, tutoring, etc.) for supporting intelligent DNS management using web interface and expert system technology to help inexperienced administrators in insuring the smooth operation of their DNS systems. To help extract knowledge, we propose an efficient DNS Ontology Construction Algorithm to fast conceptualize DNS domain knowledge through a hybrid method of brainstorming and use cases modeling. While some sub-systems are still under development, others have been prototyped and deployed for everyday use. As our experience with a first simple prototype has shown, the paradigm of using DNS ontology to build a unifying framework for intelligent DNS management works good and effective. It is supposed that all these might become an integral part of the DNS administration activities of an organization in the near future. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.