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The "Domain Name Service" is the system that TCP/IP uses to translate machine names to their IP addresses and vice versa. This is a hierarchical service and defines who is responsible for maintaining the name table for a particular domain.
Ever since the Facultad de Informática connected to the Spanish academic network (RedIRIS), the Computer Centre has been responsible for managing and maintaining the names and addresses under the "fi.upm.es" domain. Authority to manage this domain is delegated from the higher "upm.es" domain maintained by the UPM Administration.
The manager of each domain is responsible for distributing the address space. In the case of the Facultad de Informática, the general services are defined directly in "fi.upm.es", whereas departments and laboratories all have their own "subdomains". The Computer Centre also maintains these subdomains.
As part of this service the Computer Centre is responsible for assigning the IP addresses to new systems, system modifications, etc. Before an IP address is assigned, the user will be asked to supply the model of computer, operating system and Facultad de Informática location. Applications can be made via electronic mail addressed to Lucia Bruno at lucia@fi.upm.es.
Additionally, the Computer Centre maintains and supports systems that operate as DNS servers both for Facultad de Informática clients and for accesses from the remainder of the Internet. These servers maintain all the "fi.upm.es" domains.
A primary DNS server "ns.fi.upm.es" (138.100.8.23) and two secondary servers "tarzan.fi.upm.es" (138.100.8.6) and "otto.fi.upm.es"(138.100.8.11) are now up and running.
Should the Facultad de Informática communications break down, one of the UPM Computer Centre systems maintains a secondary Facultad de Informática domain name server.
Several "cache only" servers with no associated database are maintained to reduce the number of external requests.