Can somebody please introduce me to Domain Name Servers?

Question

Ive been going though MS tutorials from my college library and have reached the section on DNS.

However, I feel I need to take a few steps back and try to understand, in the context of an office environment.. what a DNS is and what it does!

From what I can gather, it is a magic box which transforms the IP addresses of individual computers into names (not sure why.. other that for the administrators conveniance!) ... yet those names are different, according to which version of windows you are using!?!?

Can somebody help me out by explaining in plain English what a DNS actually is (in terms of hardware and software) and what its main functions are?? Oh and am I right about needing different names for different versions of windows?

Oh .. as I mentioned earlier.. Im talking in terms of an office environment... Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

Well in a office enviorment your going to be utilizing it for your logins, etc providing your in a 2000/XP environment. DNS also transforms your domain names etc for you i.e. yahoo, msn.com etc. Check out the link I've included, kind of interesting in a geeky sort of way

Answer 2

Quite simply, The DNS server converts a number to a name. For example, www.yahoo.com would be converted to an ip address such as 92.138.23.2 Note that most ip addresses are dynamic, that is, they constantly change. Computers understand numbers, but, for us humans, we can remember names like yahoo, so they have a special computer that converts these back and forth for us, called a DNS server.

Answer 3

well...



A DNS is simply a server that translates those fancy internet names like "www.bobsbaitandtackle.com" to boring old 123.333.99.11 numbers.



You desktop computer is not going to keep track off all these names (not to mention they can change), so it goes and talks to a computer that does.



As far as your office environment, you probably have a local DNS. This is nice because its way faster than trying to contact and computer outside your intranet. You local DNS probably actively talks to a "master" DNS to make sure its local tables are complete and up to date.

Answer 4

It provides a link between the name (the IP address) and the computer on which the hosted files reside. For example, my name is www.somebody.com and it is registered with a company named www.registrar.com but my hosting company is www.hosting.com so the world needs to know that the files for www.somebody.com are located on www.hosting.com's computer so the dns provides the link between the name "www.somebody.com" and the file server at www.hosting.com