How DNS works
Note that it's impossible for anyone to remember the IP address of each and every service on the internet. Fortunately, there is a protocol for that! The Domain Name Server (DNS) solves this problem by maintaining a map of a human readable hierarchical name to the IP address of the service in a distributed database. Thus, when a user enters http://www.google.com in their browser and hits the Enter key, the first step is to look up the IP address of the name www.google.com using DNS. The next figure shows the steps necessary in such a query. In this discussion, we will use the names local DNS resolver, local DNS server, and local DNS nameserver interchangeably:
An application that needs to resolve a name will use ...
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