What is DNS?

In this lecture, you are going to learn what DNS is and how it is used by everyone
from major IT companies down to every day home use all around the world.

Slide 1 - DNS allows us to search the internet using names that we are familiar
with.

For example: Have you ever used Google to search for best prices on merchandise
that you wanted to purchase? Your browser may answer your request by displaying
ten stores that list current prices.

How does your computers browser know how to do this?

What does DNS have to do with this?

Slide 2 - The internet is made up of computers that are located strategically all
over the world.

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Slide 3 - Computers communicate with each other using IP address. But we
humans communicate using words. From your browser if you type in
www.google.com. You get google.com.

Slide 4 - This is a lot easier than typing the IP address for google.com which is
172.217.8.14 now imagine if you had to type in the IP address for every web site
that you visited. Well, because of DNS you don’t have to.

DNS translates host names like google.com into IP address.

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Slide 5 For example: If you type www.google.com and the IP address for
google.com is in your local memory you will get the google icon and the
google search box.

Slide 6 - If the IP address is not in your local memory,

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Slide 7 your computer will go out to the internet where it will query a
group of DNS servers.

Slide 8 – If the first server does not have google.com in its local memory it
passes that request on to the next server, if that server does not have
google.com it passes that request down the line until it finds a match.

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Slide 9 - The host name google.com has been found in DNS3’s local
memory. DNS3 passes the IP address and the domain name down the line
to the requesting DNS server in this case DNS1, until it reaches your
computer. Each time a requesting DNS server finds a domain name the IP
address is stored in the server’s local memory so the next time there is a
request for google.com the DNS server will be able to respond more
quickly.

Slide 10 – Once your computer receives the IP address of google, your

browser will know how to successfully connect to google.com.

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• DNS allows us to search the internet using names we are familiar
with.

• DNS converts domain names to IP addresses.

• So, the next time you type amazon.com or google.com into your
computers browser, you can say, this is no mystery because you now
know and understand HOW DNS WORKS!

Thanks for watching, and we will see you on the next lecture.