So, lots of us have heard people talk about DNS outages and networking issues revolving around DNS. I will try to keep this short and yet explain everything in as much detail as possible.
DNS? What is DNS? At the beginning of the internet, systems were starting to communicate using IP addresses and piratically IPv4 addresses. An example I will use throughout this is www.google.com, which resolves to 64.233.177.102. By the time I am done, I will be able to recite that by memory.
Not many people think about DNS until it’s not working, but for a network or systems administrator, it’s something that’s at the front of their minds all the time. Especially redundancy, you always want a backup of your backup!
Now, let’s say you’re the typical user who opens up Google Chrome or Firefox, you don’t think much about what’s going on behind the screens. However, there’s a lot of things going on. You opened your browser, it’s loading the homepage. For us let’s say https://www.devry.edu, only that’s not the first connection that’s made. The first thing which happens is your browser begins the process of looking for www.devry.edu. Checking with your operating systems network services first, “Can you resolve www.devry.edu for me? No, Ok”. Then your PC’s OS will use the given DNS server it received from DHCP normally assigned by your home router. For some this is simply 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.254, almost everyone’s configuration is different so these IPs can change depending on your setup.
