How internet is Operating part 1
How Internet is operating (part 1)
Internet is still a mystery for a lot of the users, though they know how to use the internet but many are curious about how does this work. All they know is to connect their laptops, computers or other devices to a telephone line with a 56K modem or more recently with a DSL modem or a dongle to connect with their service providers.
Internet was first invented for some military communication purpose and later it evolves in cooperate world, the growth of internet is so rapid that now from education to counseling services, purchasing goods to doctors advices every thing is available on the internet.
And this all services and information are available to users in the form of web services; users with internet connections available to their computers can browse these web services through their internet browsers such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla. What ever the browser or internet connection is when we types address or URL in the internet browsers such as www.yahoo.com, the yahoo page displays. There is a mechanism and science behind the information your browser pulls from the internet on the behalf of the address you typed in. and there are many prospective of this mechanism, This article is all about how your web addresses get translated into IP addresses and whole DNS operation.
In order to understand the concept first you need to under stand about the DNS servers, DNS servers user to translate web addresses into IP addresses. As IP is the primary addressing architecture for internet. Normally your internet services provider will provide you the DNS server addresses for their domain or your computer will obtain it automatically by DHCP from the service provider.
In any case when you type www.yahoo.com in you internet browser, Your browser have no idea where to go and look for the page, as the name itself didn’t provide any clue for the ip address. So the machine will generate a request or query to the internet service provider DNS server to resolve the address into an IP address. And if that DNS server has the information in the cache, as someone may already visited the same page you requested. It will give the IP information for the address from its cache, but if the DNS server doesn’t have any information about the queried address, it will contact the root server of the naming architecture about the address www.yahoo.com.
A root server the DNS server of the root zone, it is the top hierarchy of naming architecture and it has the record of all top level domains such as com, org e.t.c
The root server is an important part of the Internet because it is first who provide the information for resolving a domain address or in our case the web address into IP addresses.
So our ISP’s DNS will contact the root server for the www. Yahoo.com address translation and the root server will reply that I don’t know where or what is the IP address of www. yahoo.com, but what I know is this COM domain, and I can provide you the information necessary to contact them.
Then our ISP’s DNS will contact the com domain and will ask for the same address and this time the COM will reply that it knows where or what is the IP address of yahoo, but it don’t have any information about the web services www specific information.
Then our ISP’s DNS server will contact the DNS server of the YAHOO domain and will query the IP address for the www services running in their domain. And yes the yahoo server will then provide the complete information to reach the web server and then this complete information in our case the IP address will be provided to our machine or computer from the ISP,s DNS server.
And then on the base of that IP address the whole routing or forwarding process will be start and your www request will then deliver to the yahoo web server and in the reply it will send the yahoo page to your browser.
For simplicity I keep this article simple and tried not to include any expert’s complexities, this is intended for the normal internet users to understand how this naming architecture works. I hope this article is informative to you and keep visiting the page for future updates and next part links.
