And so continues on the ABC's of Networking.  For today's letter of "B" I could have talked about bandwidth, BIGipCookie, browsers, buffer size, or bursting restrictions but I opted to pick one of the core components that keeps the internet's wheels rolling.  Today's word is the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, otherwise known as BIND.

"B" is for BIND

BIND

Pronounced: bahynd
Abbreviations: BIND, 81|\|[)

BIND, short for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, is the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet and the de facto standard on Unix-like systems.  DNS, or Domain Name System, is the "Phone book" for the Internet.  It is the protocol that allows a program to convert a user friendly server name into a physical location on the network.  Browsers use this to convert a website like www.google.com to the physical server location that is running that website.  In fact, a "nslookup" of www.google.com is likely to go to a BIND server to resolve that address for you.  A protocol is just a bunch of text in a specification until someone goes around and implements it and BIND deserves credit for being one of the longest living and largest footprint DNS implementations on the planet.

See Also: BIND on Wikipedia; BIND Developers site