What is DNS and How does it works?

We all have seen a phone book or a phone directory, in the past when we don't have mobile phones we tend to purchase a phone book from the market and use it to maintain phone numbers of our relatives and friends. It is difficult to remember every number, so we just use this phone book to keep the record of number with their respective names and whenever we need to call to a person we simply jump to his/her name and get the number from there. 

Source: Google Images

• Now you guys must be wondering why am I talking about phone book and phone directory stuff, it is because the topic for this article is DNS is short for Domain Name Server or Domain Name System, DNS can be thought of as the Internet equivalent to Phone Book, DNS maintains a directory of domain names and translate them to their respective IP addresses. 

• As we know that whatever the website we are accessing over the web is residing at some server and in order to get the service from server we need to make a request to it, now the process that we follow to make the request is to type the URL into the browser for example i have typed technicaldose.in in the address bar of my browser, now the browser will send a request to the server to process the request and get the response but before handling  the request to the server, the browser will first send the domain name that is technicaldose.in to its corresponding DNS which will convert the domain name into machine-friendly IP address and then will send it to the server and then server will do its processing part.

• As we all know that computer and machines, access websites based on IP address only, therefore it is essential to convert the domain name into IP address and for a normal user like us it is difficult to remember the numbers, therefore, we use domain name to access a particular website and in between DNS plays its part.

• Now the next question that comes to mind is that how our system or network knows that which Domain Name server has to be used for resolving the domain name to a corresponding IP address, the answer to this question is, Typically, when we get connected to our home network, Internet service provider (ISP) or WiFi network, the modem or router that assigns our computer's network address also sends some other important network configuration information to our computer or mobile device. That configuration includes one or more DNS servers that the device should use when translating DNS names to IP address.


• There are various methods by which you can see DNS server IP address, either by logging into Router's Web Gui Page by typing router's IP address into your web browser usually most of the Router's default IP address is 192.168.1.1,and then after providing username and password, just click on Status and get to see DNS IP addresses there.You can also see DNS server IP address by checking the Properties of your connection and then clicking on the Internet Protocol IPv4 version.


• Another method is to use the nslookup utility from the command prompt just type nslookup followed by the domain name and then press enter. ex: nslookup www.technicaldose.in.


• ipconfig /all can also be used to see the DNS server information.


• Information regarding all the domain name servers across the web are collected together and stored in a central repository, host companies, and the ISP's interact with this central repository on a regular basis to get updated DNS information.

I hope and believe that now you guys are aware of what DNS is and what it does.