Infrastructure Services
ESnet provides Internet Protocol Domain Name Service (IP DNS) to the ESnet community through two separate name servers. The name servers provide the primary IP hostname to address translations for the es.net domain. In addition, these machines provide secondary name service for many of the ESnet sites. Employing this functionality, sites can offload many name server queries destined for their local name servers to ESnet's machines.
DECdns
DECdns (Distributed Name Service) is a DECnet/OSI network-wide service that makes it possible to use network resources without knowing their physical location. Users and applications can assign DECdns names to resources such as nodes, disks and files.
The OMNI namespace has been created to support the transition to DECnet Phase V within the DECnet Internet. ESnet supports two root DECdns servers within the ESnet portion of the DECnet Internet (ESnet/DECnet). As ESnet sites bring up DECdns servers, they are added to the OMNI namespace.
Distributed Time Services
NTP (Network Time Protocol) is the protocol used for synchronizing the clocks on multiple hosts on the Internet. NTP allows for multiple hosts on the Internet. NTP allows for multiple clock "sources" for redundancy, and performs sanity checks across these sources to ensure that the local host's time is accurate. ESnet provides several Stratum 1 time servers on the network. These time servers also provide DECdts (DEC Distributed Time Service) services to the ESnet/DECnet community.
