06 December 2001

How DNS works When you surf the web, your browser uses the Domain Name System, or DNS, to find the computer where the web page you're looking for is stored. The DNS is also used to route email round the Internet. A couple of days ago, an email server of ours up in Quito (here's a map) stopped working, and it turned out to be a problem with the DNS servers. I was a bit rusty on exactly how the system works, but I found a lovely explanation on How Stuff Works. This goes into a reasonable amount of detail, but I'd say that it is just about accesible for complete beginners: "When you use the web or send an email message, you use a domain name to do it. For example, the following URL: http://www.howstuffworks.com Contains the domain name howstuffworks.com. So does this email address: brain@howstuffworks.com Human-readable names like howstuffworks.com 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. For example, the machine that humans refer to as www.howstuffworks.com has an IP address of 216.27.61.137. 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!" 3:08:53 PM