Edenyard wrote:
>
> The questions I'd like answered are these: if you can put any DNS
> number in the box, why does an ISP supply a specific one? Am I right in
Speed, if everyone in the world used the same servers they would
be dog slow. Also, those servers had to contain all the DNS information
int the world. If those servers died all of the Internet would go
down. If a DNS server currently fails, only a small number of people
are affected.
> thinking that the DNS points the browser to a sort of look-up table that
> translates www.something.com into a nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn, which actually
> refers to a computer on the network? If so, is there a list of all the
> translators worldwide that can be used to do this? If that's the case,
> why don't ISPs simply issue that list to allow you to pick one? Is the
> DNS that an ISP issues proprietary to that ISP? What's the point of
> dynamically changing the DNS?
>
DNS is a distributed database used to map URLs to IPs as you said.
No one owns that database, everyone who provides connection to the
Internet sets up a DNS server to allow his computers to use the DNS
service. Also it adds information about his computers to the global
database.
example:
computer A wants to go to www.arachne.cz
It asks its DNS server about www.arachne.cz .
If the DNS server knows about www.arachne.cz it will the A its IP.
If it doesn't know about it it will contact the top server of .cz
that server will tell were to find arachne.cz . Then the DNS server
asks the arachne.cz DNS server about www.arachne.cz .
The arachne.cz DNS server will tell the wanted IP adress is
212.24.129.58 . The local DNS server will forward this to computer A.
(reality is a little bit more complex, but you'll get the idea)
BTW DNS stands for Domain Name Server
> One further question: asuming that my reasoning about using any DNS
> numbers is wrong and that it is critical in some way which one you use,
> what is going to happen to Arachne if more and more ISPs start changing
> their DNSs dynamically so that the number that is stored in Arachne's
> set-up is then invalid? Are there any plans to make Arachne cope with
> dynamic DNS?
>
probably
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Casper Gielen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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We do not kill enough professors. Stalin
