Like most networking protocols, DNS has two parts: a service providing answers and a DNS client that queries the service. The BIND software and its associated daemon named provides the default DNS service in the Oracle Solaris operating system. BIND is maintained by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). The DNS client consists of a collection of utilities and libraries.
Multicast DNS (mDNS) provides a naming service system that is easy to set up and enables you to easily maintain systems on a local link. All participating network devices on the same local link perform standard DNS functions, using mDNS rather than unicast, and do not need a unicast DNS server. For administrators, the primary advantage of mDNS is that you do not need to maintain a unicast DNS server on the local network. For example, you do not need to update and maintain host names in files to resolve hostname-to-IP address requests for systems on the local link that are using mDNS.
Network services include printing, file transfer, music sharing, servers for photo, document, and other file sharing, and services provided by other local devices. DNS service discovery support in Oracle Solaris includes an open-source framework and tools to enable applications to advertise and discover network services.
For users, network service discovery makes computing easier by enabling them to browse for services on the network rather than needing to find the service manually. Existing standards and work by other companies and groups ensure that cross-platform support is available.
For information about DNS and BIND administration, see the following sources:
BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual on the ISC web site at http://www.isc.org
BIND 9 Migration Notes documentation in the /usr/share/doc/bind/migration.txt file
Listings of BIND features, known bugs and defects, and links to additional material on the ISC web site at http://www.isc.org
DNS and Bind (5th Edition), by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu, (O'Reilly, 2006)