| If
you spend any time on the Internet sending email or browsing
the web, then you use Domain Name Servers without even realizing
it. Domain Name Servers, or DNS, are an incredibly important
but completely hidden part of the Internet, and they are fascinating!
The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active distributed
databases on the planet, and without DNS the Internet would
shut down very quickly. |
| Human-readable
names are easy for human beings to remember, but they don't
do machines any good. All of the machines use names called IP
Addresses to refer to one another. Every time you use a domain
name, you use the Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to translate
the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable IP
address. During a day of browsing and emailing, you might access
the domain name servers hundreds of times! |
| Domain
name servers translate domain names to IP addresses. That sounds
like a simple problem, and it would be except for five things: |
| 1) |
There
are billions of IP addresses currently in use, and most machines
have a human readable name as well.
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| 2) |
There
are many billions of requests made from domain name servers
every day. You yourself can easily make a hundred or more
DNS requests a day, and there are hundreds of millions of
people and machines using the Internet every day.
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| 3) |
Domain
names and IP addresses change daily.
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| 4) |
New
domain names get created daily.
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| 5) |
Millions
of people do the work to change and add domain names and IP
addresses every day.
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| The
DNS system is a database, and no other database on the planet
gets this many requests. No other database on the planet has
millions of people changing it every day either. That is what
makes the DNS system so unique! |
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