Get To Know DNS

Did you ever wonder how you can type www.startrek.com into your web browser and it instantly transports you to the official website for Star Trek. Our how you can shop at amazon.com by simply entering www.amazon.com into your browser? This magic is all made possible by something known as the Domain Name System, or DNS.

You can think of DNS as the phone book of the internet, which is really what it was intended to be.

DNS was born way back in 1983 as part of the emerging internet. DNS is critical because without it reaching destinations on the internet would be a much more complex task.

It is DNS that converts www.startrek.com into 72.34.239.185 which is the real internet address of the official home of Star Trek. Give it a try by typing in 72.34.239.185 into your browser and see where you end up. Very simply DNS converts the real numeric internet addresses into friendly hostnames that we can easily remember.

There is a lot of stuff going on when you browse the web.

 

I am discussing this because we are fast approaching the 30^th anniversary of DNS. This is an amazing technology that we use every day on the internet. What is so amazing about this is that the translation into the “friendly hostname” is made so quickly and with so little effort (on our part) that many do not even know this translation is occurring.

How does this happen on my home computer? There are several public DNS servers that provide this service. Your computer normally uses the public DNS servers which are pre-configured in the router you have at home. So what happens at home is that when you type a web address into your browser, lets say www.startrek.com you PC talks to your router, then your router go to the Public DNS server it is setup for and translates it back to your browser. This is all done in a blink of an eye. Amazing.

DNS is an example of what I call “invisible technology”. Something that everyone relies on and the majority are unaware of its existence.

You can look at a list of some public DNS servers here.