#5 Your Domain

Attack the DNS

"Produce an artifact describing what 'DNS' is and how it works", says the task Nr.5 of the Webmaking Challenges 101...


Well, a week ago I had no idea what DNS is, how to register a Domain Name or how to publish a website. All I always did was create all the necessary files for the website and give it to someone else to deal with all the publishing stuff. 

You cannot imagine how glad I am about taking this challenge and finaly understand all this. 
Anyway, the task is about DNS and what it does. I did a little research around web and found some really nice and clear explenations about the subject. Basically DNS is a short name for Domain Name System. I will try to explain as simply as I can, or in other words, that is how I look at things and understand them. 
So Domain Name is the actual address to the page or website that your willing to see. In other words it's the name that goes right after the "www." on the browser address bar on top. As we know, www stands for World Wide Web, and that goes in front of every single web address (domain name). So if I want to have a website for my restaurant for example, which is called "Amazing Pasta", of course I would like to be able to find it on web simply by typing the name of the restaurant. If no one else has already taken and using the name "Amazing Pasta", I can register it and it's mine, all I have to do now is to create a website and publish it. Sounds quite simple right...???!!! And it is... But it wouldn't be that simple if there wouldn't be the Domain Name System (DNS). So let's try to imagine a world, a web without DNS. What would happen...??? Well, it's like talking to another person not knowing his/her language. Let me explain it using a picture:

So here we are, a computer thinking and talking in it's own (numeric) language which not all of us are able to understand, and then there is a person, talking in the language that he understands best. What happens if they try to communicate using each different language...???

That's right, no understanding at all, why is that...??? Why do we use a different language...??? Easy, for a human mind is much easier to remember things using words, coz that's the language we use in every day. What happens if I try to tell my computer to show me the www.google.com website, as we do now, we just type the address in the address box in our browser, but since the computer language is numeric, they simply don't know what it means if we type the words. To make a computer understand what I want from him, I should provide him the google address in numbers (Internet Protocol (IP) address), which is actually possible because every single domain name has it's IP address. 
So if I know the IP address for www.google.com which is the same only in numbers and I provide it to the computer, it will understand and get me what I need. That means that I need to know the right number to insert. There are tools to do that, to help you find the right IP address for any website. Usually it's something like this

74.125.224.72.

Try if you want, just go ahead and enter it in your browser's address bar and your browser will understand you.... However, if every person would have to remember all the IP addresses, it would become a nightmare to navigate the web. Plus, the IP addresses for many sites change from time to time...

Anyway, there we are willing to see the www.google.com page and really dissapointed not being able to comunicate with our computer. And there it is, there comes the DNS to help us:

DNS is like a translator for us, it knows the computer language and knows human language, it's perfect!!! So now that there is our translator there is also an understanding... Meaning, if I type in the "www.google.com", the DNS takes it and translates it to the websites IP address and sends the request in a way that computer understands it... Then it takes the numeric data stored in a database and translates it in "human" language so it's easy for us to understand...

And everybody's happy...!!! 

I do hope that I was able to explain it to you well and that now you know a bit more about how it works when you simply type the address of any website in your browser.