Explain the role of DHCP and DNS within the network.

Objective 4.3 sits in IP Services, which carries 10% of the CCNA exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Cisco page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Cisco exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

4-3IP ServicesModerate

A workstation queries its local name server for a name in a zone that server does not hold. The server questions other servers itself and hands back the final answer. Which approach is this?

Iterative resolution driven by the client resolverIterative service hands back a referral to a server closer to the data and leaves the asking host to send the next query itself.

A zone transfer between primary and secondary serversA zone transfer copies a whole zone between servers authoritative for it. It maintains the data, and answers no individual lookup.

Recursive resolution performed by the name serverCorrect · your answerCorrect. The server did the chasing and returned an answer, not a referral.

An inverse query mapping an address back to a nameAn inverse query starts from data and works back toward a name. It was never the mechanism behind ordinary forward lookups.

Correct.

Checked against datatracker.ietf.org, August 2026

Concept

When a queried server does not hold the data, the work of chasing it falls either on that server or back onto the host that asked. Which one carries it is what separates the two general approaches the domain system defines, and only one of the two is mandatory to implement.

Why C

The first server pursued the question at other servers on the client's behalf and returned an answer rather than a pointer. That mode is optional and a server may restrict which clients get it, which is why a workstation cannot assume every server it reaches will do the same work.

Source

The two general approaches to dealing with this problem are "recursive", in which the first server pursues the query for the client at another server, and "iterative", in which the server refers the client to another server and lets the client pursue the query.

IETF RFC 1034: Domain Names, Concepts and Facilities, checked August 2026

#dns#name-resolution#recursion

Now you: objective 4.3 questions

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Sample question 1 of 2

4-3IP ServicesEasyChoose 2

A branch is built with no static addressing, and hosts must find both their address and their DNS resolver. Which two jobs does DHCP do there? (Choose two.)

Sample question 2 of 2

4-3IP ServicesEasy

A company hosts its own DNS zone. How many name servers must support it?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

A worked example

Now you: objective 4.3 questions

Read the sources

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