Introduction
Every individual who has surfed over the internet has knowingly or unknowingly used the services of domain name server also known as a DNS server or name server, which is responsible for administering massive database thus mapping domain names to IP addresses. It is independent of the fact that whether a web site is accessed or e-mail transfer, the computer utilizes a DNS server to look up the domain name that is being accessed. This whole process can be defined as a domain name server resolution, which means that the domain name server resolves the IP address to the domain name. To elaborate it further, when the address of a site is entered as www.blahblahblahblah.com in the browser, the network connection includes partially resolving the domain name into an IP address, say for an example 42.90.341.67, for blahblahblah.com’s web servers.
History
Hence without the domain name servers, the internet would not function normally. So how does any individual’s computer know what domain name server to use? When the connection is established with one’s home network, the internet service provider ) ISP0 or WI-Fi networks, the routers or the modems that are there to assign the computer’s network address also forwards some important network configuration information to the user’s computer or mobile device. That particular information thus includes one or more domain name servers that the particular device will be utilized when translating the domain name server names to the IP address itself.
Features
The domain name servers can therefore be termed as very important but at the same time invisible component of the internet, and definitely forms one of the huge databases. Keeping in mind the IP addresses of all the websites that are used worldwide is impossible for the human beings, because these strings of numbers cannot be remembered easily. However humans can remember words and that is why the domain names have been made. Therefore if anyone wants to connect to a particular site, its IP address is needed to be known and there is no need to know its URL. Rest is the work of the domain name server which does the mappings of the names and the corresponding IP addresses. So, it must now be clearly understood that the function of a domain name server is to convert the machine names such as www.lmn.com to IP addresses like 123.456.789.0, thus translating from a name to the address and from the address to the name.
Tips and comments
Actually when the user types www.lmn.com in his/her browser, the browser first requires looking up the IP address of that particular site and the machine uses a directory service to look up the IP address of that site, hence upon typing the name of the site the machine first searches for and contacts a domain name server, further requesting it to search the IP address pertaining to that site. This domain name server may then contact other domain name servers over the internet to complete the assigned request. This procedure can also be referred to as the game of names and numbers.
