Understanding Domain Name Services (DNS)

Picture yourself walking into an old library. There are no computers. You are looking for a book. How do you find it?

You approach a wooden file cabinet with lots of small drawers. This was called "the card file." In the card file are thousands of index cards with letters and numbers on them. You want to look up a certain topic, say "gardening." You open the drawer with a "G" on it. Once you find the correct card, you look for numbers. Those numbers tell you which section and which row of shelves in the library to go to in order to find a book on the topic of gardening.

In this illustration, the library represents the Internet, the books represent computers on the Internet, the numbers on the index card represent the public IP (Internetworking Protocol) address of the computer where information about gardening is stored.

The wooden file cabinet with the drawers? Well, that's DNS (Domain Name Services). Except that on the Internet, the DNS system is a group of computers (mostly run by Internet Service Providers - "ISPs") which are arranged in hierachical order. Basically, that means that there is a chain of command with each computer reporting to other computers that have a higher rank.

Finally, that all-important index card - that is a DNS Record. There are several components to a DNS record, but the three most critical portions are the Domain Name itself, the Authoritative Name Servers for the Domain, and the Mail Exchanger (MX) Record.

Some Domain Name Examples:

• google.com
• digitalwest.net
• irs.gov
• berkley.edu

When you open your web browser on your computer, it loads a "start page." If you use Internet Explorer, the default is probably msn.com or mydell.com. In order to get you there, your computer has to do several things:

1. Look into its TCP/IP settings to find which DNS servers it should talk to.
2. Query the first DNS server listed: "What is the IP address for http://www.mydell.com/?"
3. That DNS server probably has to ask which other DNS server on the Internet has the authority to answer for that domain name.
4. Once the DNS server (the one listed in your computer's TCP/IP settings) gets the appropriate IP address (in other words, it knows it has the correct information from the cardfile in the library), it reports the IP address to your PC.
5. Your computer connects to http://www.mydell.com/ using the IP address that the DNS server supplied, and the data is transferred.

Registering a Domain Name

Look in any copyrighted book and you'll see an ISBN number. That number is assigned by the United States Library of Congress. Look up that ISBN number anywhere, and it will always return the same book title and author. Why? Because there is only one authority which assigns that number and maintains that data - the US Library of Congress.

Imagine that the US Library of Congress decided to relinquish control of maintaining that database, and allow bookstores to register new book titles, and communicate and agree with each other to match all book titles to the correct ISBN numbers. Oh, yes, and in this made-up scenario, those ISBN numbers will change periodically. Sounds crazy, right? What was broken with the old way?

At first, only one entity was controlling all the domains. It charged lots of money and the registration process was cumbersome. Also, making any necessary changes to the information became cumbersome, and the US government wanted to create "competition on the Internet."

So, they decentralized the domain name registration process (and only the registration process, not the hierachical structure of the actual DNS record system) and created "competition". You no longer have to contact Network Solutions and pay $200 for every domain name that you wanted to register. You can now go to any of a myriad of companies who are "registrars" and register your domain name(s). You might recognize some of the names of these registrars:

• Network Solutions (yes, they're still in business and the largest registrar - they just don't have the stranglehold that they used to)
• GoDaddy.com (they created quite a splash with their SuperBowl ad making a farce of the Janet Jackson/CBS scandal)
• BulkRegister
• TuCows

When you register a domain name, you are telling the US Government (and possibly the world) that *YOU* own that domain. During the process, you give personal information - name, mailing address, telephone number, email address, etc. Two very important contact fields are the Administrative Contact and the Technical Contact.

The Administrative Contact is the person that the Registrar will attempt to contact when:

1. the domain registration term is expiring
2. Someone attempts to make changes to the DNS record

The Technical Contact is the person that will typically be contacted if the domain is having problems of some sort. Or, if the Administrative Contact does not respond, sometimes the Technical Contact will be contacted.

Wait - why would someone other than the domain owner try to make changes to the domain name record?

As you can imagine, whenever there is "opportunity", that is where the vultures will gather. There are plenty of scams that unsavory people attempt to perpetrate on unsuspecting consumers. They may attempt to dupe you into paying money to "re-register" your domain, when it isn't even expiring. They may attempt to re-direct your website to get your customers to visit their site instead. They may try to "hi-jack" your domain name so that they can charge you exorbitant sums of money to get it back. Lots of things can happen.

Back to FAQ