noob here. dns question

[invertigo]

what exactly is a DNS solution. for example dyndns.com offers business DNS solutions etc. can someone explain the whole DNS scene to me and what it is useful for?

 

[scottws]

DNS is Domain Name System. It's basically what makes the World Wide Web function. Otherwise instead of remembering "www.anandtech.com," we'd have to remember something like "80.125.63.10" (just made that IP up).

Say you type in www.anandtech.com in your browser. By default, your computer has no idea where to send packets for a request, so it queries a DNS server to see if it contains an entry for www.anandtech.com. If it does, then the specific IP address that corresponds the server hosting www.anandtech.com is returned and your computer then sends packets to that IP address. If it does not, then the DNS server queries another DNS server to see if that one has the correct IP address and that IP address is sent back to you.

This is a very simplistic explaination of what DNS is, but it gives you the gist of what it is for.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry for DNS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dns

Basically, a "solution" is a DNS server. Instead of having and configuring your own DNS server for your company or situtaion, you can outsource it.

 

[Goosemaster]

scott seems to have explained DNS well so I'll finish up:



dyndns.com offers free services to users so that htey can remotely access their pcs

every publicly conencted pc has an ip address. if for some reason you want to get to it you have to memorize that number. all isps by default offer dynamically assigned ip addresses to their customers that change periodically. that is why memorizing your ip is fruitless.

What dyndns does is has either your router or a software client on yoru pc constantly update their database with it's ip address for the moment. that way, if your ip address changes, they will know what it is.


this is the best part: they assign a name to your IP account, so everytime you access that named account, it will look up your ip and send you there.

for example, lets say my computers ip is 70.87.5.87 and I created an account with dyndns.org called "foo.dyndns.org"

dyndns.org will have your recorded address on file, even when it changes, so when you access foo.dyndns.org, it will foward you to your IP, which at the moment would be 70.87.5.87

It's actually really useful.


Let's say you wnat to run a website at home. this way if you are runnign a webserver at home that will respond to webpage requests, visitors will ALWAYS be able to access it @ http://foo.dyndns.org, or if it is an ftp server ftp://foo.dyndns.org


The possibilities are endless.


Hell, I use it for PPPTP VPN tunneling (<-----you might have to read up on that for quite some time to understand what that means)