Name Lookups with DNS

Now comes the really ingenuous part about DNS. If you want to find out the IP-address of erdos, then, DNS says, go ask the people that manage it, and they will tell you.

In fact, DNS is a giant distributed database. It is implemented by means of so-called name servers that supply information on a given domain or set of domains. For each zone, there are at least two, at most a few, name servers that hold all authoritative information on hosts in that zone. To obtain the IP-address of erdos, all you have to do is contact the name server for the groucho.edu zone, which will then return the desired data.

Easier said than done, you might think. So how do I know how to reach the name server at Groucho Marx University? In case your computer isn't equipped with an address-resolving oracle, DNS provides for this, too. When your application wants to look up information on erdos, it contacts a local name server, which conducts a so-called iterative query for it. It starts off by sending a query to a name server for the root domain, asking for the address of erdos.maths.groucho.edu. The root name server recognizes that this name does not belong to its zone of authority, but rather to one below the edu domain. Thus, it tells you to contact an edu zone name server for more information, and encloses a list of all edu name servers along with their addresses. Your local name server will then go on and query one of those, for instance a.isi.edu. In a manner similar to the root name server, a.isi.edu knows that the groucho.edu people run a zone of their own, and point you to their servers. The local name server will then present its query for erdos to one of these, which will finally recognize the name as belonging to its zone, and return the corresponding IP-address.

Now, this looks like a lot of traffic being generated for looking up a measly IP-address, but it's really only miniscule compared to the amount of data that would have to be transferred if we were still stuck with HOSTS.TXT. But there's still room for improvement with this scheme.

To improve response time during future queries, the name server will store the information obtained in its local cache. So the next time anyone on your local network wants to look up the address of a host in the groucho.edu domain, your name server will not have to go through the whole process again, but will rather go to the groucho.edu name server directly.

Of course, the name server will not keep this information forever, but rather discard it after some period. This expiry interval is called the time to live, or TTL. Each datum in the DNS database is assigned such a TTL by administrators of the responsible zone.