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What Is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is used to translate domain names to IP addresses. It works by maintaining a database that maps hostnames to IP addresses. When a device wants to access a website or resource, it first checks its local DNS server to resolve the hostname to an IP address. If the local server does not have the record, it will query other DNS servers in a hierarchical system until it finds the correct IP address mapping. This process allows humans to use readable domain names instead of numerical IP addresses.

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179 views4 pages

What Is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is used to translate domain names to IP addresses. It works by maintaining a database that maps hostnames to IP addresses. When a device wants to access a website or resource, it first checks its local DNS server to resolve the hostname to an IP address. If the local server does not have the record, it will query other DNS servers in a hierarchical system until it finds the correct IP address mapping. This process allows humans to use readable domain names instead of numerical IP addresses.

Uploaded by

ajay_soni01
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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http://www2.isupportyou.net/2010/07/understanding-dns-domain-naming-server.

html
Hi Friends,
First of all thanks for visiting my blog. I added Search option for my blog, you can easily
search for a particular topic using Google Search. If you are facing any issues, or if you have any
questions please mail me at [email protected] Thanks.

Coming into the Topic.


What is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Naming Server, it is a standard of naming domains in any operational
environment (Windows,Linux,Solaris,Any environment). It is a server which contains a database
of all the domains and all the servers which are associated with those domains.
Why it is Used?
Its a service dedicated to identify all the machines (domains & member servers) in a network. To
make this possible, every machine has to be registered in the authoritative DNS server of that
network. That means every operational network should have a dedicated DNS server to enable
identification and communication between the machines.
How it works?
As i said, it is dedicatedly used for identification, in technical words for name resolution.
Every machine in a network has a dedicated IP address & hostname as its identity. Whenever a
machine tries to communicate with another machine on the network it should first identify the
second machine, that means it should know the ip address of that particular machine. After
knowing the identity (i.e ip address), it will directly communicates with the second machine. So
to speak, a machine should know the ip address of the another machine, with which its going to
communicate before it starts. Another question Why the hostnames are used, if the machine
already have an identity in the terms of IP address? Hostname is an English word which is useful
for Human remembrance. It is impossible for a human being to remember lots of IP addresses,
but it is possible to remember English names of the same hosts (as we configure the hostnames
generally with employee name or department name or location name etc). For example we can
remember www.yahoo.com but not its ip address, because we are not having only one website on
the internet. To sum up Hostnames and IP addresses both are used to identification and
communication between two machines in a network. But machines are only able to communicate
with the IP addresses and which are impossible to remember for Humans (Keep in mind

machines never communicate with hostnames). To solve this situation DNS was implemented. It
basically contains a database of host records in a network. A host record contains Hostname :
IP address, see the image below for better under standing. Out Internet is purely depended on
DNS, when we access a particular website we will give its English name, when we press ENTER
immediately the machines starts finding the IP address of the website using the DNS server
configured on it. I will explain the name resolution process in details. And one more thing about
the DNS is, it is the only largest database on the internet which changes every second. If this
database goes down by a chance, we must remember all the ip addresses to access the internet.
hahaha it will not happen, why because we have so many backup solutions already implemented.

How the name resolution takes place?


I will explain this concept with internet as an example. Before that i want you to check some
settings on your machine. Check the TCP/IP properties and see whether DNS server is
configured or not. If you are seeing obtain automatically option, open command prompt and type
ipconfig /all and press Enter. You will get DNS servers information along with your machines
IP address. Now lets talk about the scenario, When you try to open a website like
www.google.com, what happens next? how your machine gets IP address of the
www.google.com. Here it goes.
1. The request sent to the DNS server which is configured on your machine.
2. The DNS server checks for the host record of www.google.com in its database, if it contains a
record for www.google.com, it will directly send response with the IP address of
www.google.com. Otherwise it starts requesting another DNS server.
3. Before it goes to another DNS server, how it identifies which DNS server is responsible for
this request ? It checks the entire hostname (it is called as FQDN : Fully Qualified Domain
Name), i.e in googles case www.google.com. (note the FQDN ends with a period, and this
period is called as root domain).

4. Every DNS server contains a roothint file associated with it, and the same will be used to
identify the responsible DNS server. Root hint file contains Master DNS servers information.
Here you go it looks like this. These are the master DNS servers for .com, .net, .edu, .org
domains etc.
5. So in your case, the domain is .com, DNS server
sends request to .com master DNS server (for ex:
assume it as 198.41.0.4), the .com master DNS server
contains name server records for all machines ending
with .com . That means it definitely contains DNS
server IP address for google.com. In the same way it contains all .com servers yahoo.com,
microsoft.com & so on.
6. It does not contain the IP address of google.com, it contains DNS server IP of google.com.
7. So then the request is forwarded to google.com DNS server, in that server you will have a host
record with the name www and its IP address. Finally you reached it. With the found IP address
the request comes back as a response in the same reverse way to the DNS server which is
configured in your machine, that DNS server tells the IP address of www.google.com to your
machine.
8. This process happens in milliseconds in the background. i.e by the time you will get Website
found waiting for reply message in the status bar of your internet explorer.
9. Oh my god!!!! Is that simple? Yes it is. The same process occurs in corporate networks also.
But the requests are handled by their local DNS servers only.
In my previous discussion about Understanding DNS, you learned most of the basic things
related to DNS. In this post i want to elaborate more about DNS. Let's start...
DNS Records
There are so many records associated with a DNS Server. Name resolution process does not
happen in a proper way with out these records.
As you know the DNS server main purpose is to resolve the host names to IP's and vice versa.

A Record : Contains information about IP address. It is helpful in resolving host names to


IP addresses.

PTR Record : Pointer record, contains information about host name. It is helpful in
resolving IP address to hostname.

CNAME Record : Alias of A Record. It is helpful in giving multiple names to a single


host. Which means, the same host is able to provide multiple services. In that case, for
segregation of service and to communicate with that service we need to give different
names to each service. Even though these services are hosted on a single server, but we
can send our request to the target service. CNAME record was helpful in identifying and
communicating with that service on that server.

MX Record : It is a record helpful in identifying the mail server in a DNS domain (for
that organization)

NS Record : It is a record helpful in identifying the DNS server in a DNS domain (for
that organization)

SRV Record : This record is created when we install a service which is DNS dependent.
It is automatically generated and will be associated with a specific IP address. It is called
as Service record.

SOA Record : Start of Authority record, this is not a record associated with any IP
address. But it is associated with a number, which determines the update number. What
ever the update, when ever it is done this number will be incremented.

These are the records associated with each and every server in this world. A fact is that " DNS is
the biggest database in the world and that is the only one which gets updated every second
" And this database is not located at a single place, it is spread across the world in different
places like, different companies, different ISP's, different homes etc. And the name resolution
process is explained in my previous post Understanding DNS. That is the reason why, a DNS
request goes to different location to get the correct answer.
In my next article related to DNS, i will discuss about HOW TO TROUBLESHOOT DNS
PROBLEMS, KEEP VISITING OR SUBSRCIBE NOW TO GET THE LATEST POST
UPDATES.

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