Computer Networking › Section B · The application layer › Topic B.4
DNS: the internet's directory service
People remember names such as www.example.org, but packets are delivered to IP addresses. The Domain Name System translates one into the other billions of times a day, using a distributed database that no single organisation holds and that works because almost every answer is cached.
In this topic
- What DNS provides
- Why not one central server?
- The hierarchy of servers
- Resolvers: recursive and iterative queries
- Worked example: timing a lookup
- Caching and time to live
- Resource records
- Worked example: moving a website
- Registering a domain
- Security and privacy
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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