In the real world as humans we feel comfortable identifying everything around us with specific names whether it be other humans,animals or any object we associate its identification with various names but while on the internet computers/servers are identified with numbers also know as IP addresses.These IP addresses are the reason we are able to communicate with various computers all over the world with the help of internet.
As we feel comfortable with names but the computers on the network use numbers for their identification there tends to arise a problem where we find it hard to memorize these long numeric addresses to communicate with computers so as a result to resolve this and help people use the internet and communicate with various servers were made easy with the introduction to DNS also know as Domain Name System.
Domain Name System is the bridge which translates IP addresses to domain names.For examples these are various domain names with their IP addresses.
- Name: facebook.com Address: 157.240.198.35(IP V4) Name: facebook.com Address: 2a03:2880:f144:82:face:b00c:0:25de(IP V6)
- Name: google.com Address: 172.217.160.174(IP V4) Name: google.com Address: 2404:6800:4009:80a::200e(IP V6)
- Name: linkedin.com Address: 108.174.10.10(IP V4) Name: linkedin.com Address: 2620:109:c002::6cae:a0a(IP V6)
You could copy and paste the IP V4 addresses which will automatically redirect you to their respective domain names.
THE PROCESS
As our machine could not resolve the domain’s IP address within our machine it sends a query to your ISP’s server where if our ISP’s server has the IP address cached it will provide it to us then our machine could request for the results to the particular server with the help of the IP address provided by our ISP.
If our ISP does not have the IP address we were looking for it sends a request to the ROOT SERVER.There are 13 sets of root servers around the world which are handled by 12 different organizations of the world.The root server then redirects the request to TLD servers also know as TOP LEVEL DOMAIN.These TLD servers are supposed to have addresses information for top level domains such as .com,.net,.org etc.But the TLD will still not have the IP address of our domain so it redirects us to Authoritative Name Server.
Authoritative Name Servers are the ones who are supposed to have all the information regarding the domain.Then as the request reaches the authoritative name server it will have the desired IP address of the domain and then sends it back to our machine so that we can access the information we require via the web using the ip addresses associated with our query.
As technology is just a tool to help us live a better and easier life DNS is also a tool which helps us browse the web in a easy and fast way so we could concentrate more on the information we seek rather than spending time trying to figure out the way get information from the internet with very confusing and long numeric addresses.
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