What is The Usage of DNS

Have you ever wondered what’s the usage of the DNS (Domain Name System) servers set on your computer?

It is mainly used to convert human meaningful names (domain name) to computer meaningful name (IP address) in Internet. This is because computers can only recognize IP addresses. It allows you to use internet more easily by allowing you to specify a meaningful name on your web browser instead of using IP address.

For example, whenever you key in www.yahoo.com, www.aol.com, www.google.com or other URLs, those meaningful names will be translated to IP addresses by DNS server in the background. It makes your life easier by allowing you to just memorize human meaningful name instead of IP address. Some examples of IP addresses are 192.168.1.1, 63.12.34.36 and 202.188.0.133.

Here is the way to check domain name system server set in Windows XP.

1) Go to Start and click Run.

2) Run window will appear. Type cmd and click OK.

3) Command prompt window will appear. Enter ipconfig /all and you will know the domain name system servers set. In this example, the servers are 202.188.0.133 and 202.188.1.5.

Note: ISP will usually provide you the 2 servers IP information, primary and secondary servers. It means the secondary server will be used whenever primary server is down.

Check out here on how to check DNS information by using nslookup command. If you want to learn more on DNS topic, here are the books talking more about DNS!