Domain Name System

Prepared By: Kirti Tandel

 Domain Name System
 Web Address:
http://www.mywebsite.com/pages/index.html

This is also called URL(Uniform Resource Locater).

It essentially gives where the web page is and how
You need to talk to it.

The first part is http:// and that tells your PC which

Protocol to use talk to this site.
 The next part “mywebsite.com” is called the
domain name.

 The www is for world wide web. Today, it is, for

the most part, assumed and you can get to the
same page regardless of whether or not you type.

 The part "/pages/index.htm" tells the web server

to look in the directory called "pages" and send
the file called “index.html" to your browser. It is
just like the directories on your
PC
 Before we get into DNS, we need to explain what
an IP address is. Every PC and server has an IP
address on the Internet. It has the format of 4
numbers, separated by periods, and looks like
"64.17.143.84". Each number should be between
0 and 255.

 For people, it is much easier to remember

"www.mywebsite.com" than it is to remember
"64.17.143.84". When you enter a URL into your
browser, you usually use the easy to remember
name
 How does your PC know where to find
"www.mywebsite.com ?

 Remember that each machine has a IP address?

There is a way to translate from the easy to
remember domain name, and the hard to
remember IP address.
 Enter DNS.
 DNS stands for two things: Domain Name Service
and Domain Name Servers. (DNS Service+DNS
Server=Domain Name System)
 One acronym defines the protocol, the other
defines the machines that provide the service.
 The job that DNS performs is very simple: it takes
the IP addresses that computers connected to the
Internet use to communicate with each other and
it maps them to hostnames.
 How DNS Works :
 we need to begin by looking at the different types
of DNS servers.
 The first type of server is called a 'Root Name
Server.' Each Top Level Domain (such as .com,
.edu, .us, etc) has one or more Root Name
Servers which are responsible for determining
where the individual records are held. These
servers are fairly static and every machine on the
internet has the capability of reaching any of
them, as needed.
 Root DNS Servers

TLD
Servers
com DNS servers ca DNS servers edu DNS servers

yahoo.com amazon.com ucalgary.ca usask.ca poly.edu umass.edu

DNS servers DNS servers DNS servers DNS servers DNS servers DNS servers

Client wants IP for www.amazon.com

 client queries a root server to find com DNS server

 client queries com DNS server to get amazon.com DNS server

 client queries amazon.com DNS server to get IP address for

www.amazon.com
 The servers that the Root Name Servers direct
queries to are called 'Authoritative Name Servers'.
These are the servers which hold the actual
information on an individual domain.
 The final type of name server is called a
'Resolving Name Server'.
 These are the servers that do the majority of the
work when you are trying to get to a machine
with a certain host name.
 Besides being responsible for looking up data,
they also temporarily store the data for
hostnames that they have searched out in a
cache, which allows them to speed up the
resolution for hostnames that are frequently
visited.
The manner in which these servers work together is
fairly straightforward. When you attempt to go to a
website, you type in a hostname in your web
browser. Let's say, for convenience, that you are
going to www.foo.org. In your computers' settings
is a list of resolving name servers which it queries to
find out what www.foo.org's IP address is.
 The first thing that the resolving name servers
will do is check their caches to see if the DNS
information for www.foo.org is already there. If it
isn't, they will go and check with the .org root
name server to see which authoritative name
server holds the zone file for foo.org. Once they
have that server's IP address, they connect to it.
 Once the resolving name server has queried the
authoritative name server, it replies back to your
computer with one of a number of different
things. Ideally, it will report back with the correct
IP address and allow your computer to connect to
the web server and show you the web page that
you were looking for. However, if the
authoritative server is down, doesn't have a
record for the specific hostname that you are
looking up, or if the root server doesn't have a
record that the domain name even exists, the
resolving name server will report an error to your
computer.
Thank You…