What is DNS?

A Domain Name Server (DNS) is a protocol that falls under TCP/IP (Transmission/Internet Protocol). Put simply, DNS takes a human-readable URL like https://blonded.co/ and converts it into an associated and known IP address so that servers can interpret it. This is because computers and network devices use IP addresses as a form of identification to determine what is what.

Just as each device has their own unique IP Address, websites also have their identity expressed as a set of numbers in a form similar to 192.100.1. So whenever you visit a website, it first visits a DNS to ask for directions to where it should go by giving it the human-readable domain name.

In this case, Microsoft is part of a DNS network that looks up the IP address in a global directory so it knows where to send you. It provides this service through Azure DNS, which specifically handles domains under the Azure name server.

How does DNS work?

A DNS Server will do two things:

• maintain a local cache

• maintain a key-value database of domain-ip pairings

Maintain a local cache

Maintain a local cache of recently accessed domain names and their associated IP addresses. This is so the DNS can respond quickly with a local lookup request. You can see this where it usually takes less time to connect to a website the second time in a row than it did when you first visited the website. Now if a DNS is unable to locate the information you're looking for (if it can't find a match for the provided domain name), then it will pass down the request to another DNS server. This handshake will keep on going until either a match is found, or the request times out. So if you give it a domain that doesn't exist, it will eventually time out (hence directing you to an error)

Maintain a key-value pair database

The DNS will maintain a set of key-value pairs (domain name -> ip addresses) that the DNS has authority over. So in this example, Azure DNS will have authority over applications hosted on the Azure server (like my website).

DNS Servers are bound by location

Depending on where you're connected to the Internet, you are assigned to different DNS servers. If you're accessing a website from on-premises, you follow the DNS settings on your server. On the other hand, if you're connecting from an external location like a hotel, the DNS settings will come from the Internet Service provider (ISP) like Telstra or ADSL.

On premises = DNS Settings from the server

External (off premises) = DNS from ISP

Resolving a domain name request

A DNS takes a very methodical approach to resolving a request. The DNS follows a sequence of steps that goes from cache, to the wider network to raising an exception.

1. Check the cache to see if the domain name is stored. If so, then it uses it to fulfil the request

2. If it's not in the cache, the domain name will contact other servers to see if they have anything. It will continue doing so, and once a match has been found, the DNS will receive the response, store the pair in its local cache (for future) and resolve the request

3. In the else case where nothing can be found after checking the cache and asking around, the DNS Server will respond with a 404 Error: Domain not found

IPv4 and IPv6

As noted previously, every device connected to a network will have an IP address. This IP address will be unique to a given domain (so your network will have one IP address usually). With IP addresses, you essentially have two standards that they fall into: IPv4 or IPv6.

IPv4

IPv4 is made up of FOUR numbers separated by dots, each ranging from 0 to 255 (So they're four 8-bit numbers). This is currently the common standard for IP addresses. However, with the increase of IoT devices, there isn't enough addresses to go around, so IPv4 will eventually be superceded by IPv6 to keep up with the demand.

IPv4: 127.0.0.1

IPv6

IPv6 is the new wave, with more range than IPv4 to accommodate the increasing amount of devices on the Internet. It is made up of eight hexadecimal numbers which are each separated by a colon.

IPv6: fe80:11a1:ac15:e9gf:e884:edb0:ddee:fea3

Types of DNS Records

Stored on the DNS servers are what we call DNS Records which contain information about the configuration of the DNS server. Inside these DNS records, there are a few fields which are commonly used, namely being:

Record	Description
A	This is the host record. It's the common DNS record that maps the domain/host name to the IP address. This is what DNS servers look at to identify the domain by searching through these records stored on different servers.
CNAME	CNAME, also known as the canonical is the alias of the A record. So with different domain names hosted on different servers, the CNAME brings them all together. So if you have multiple IP addresses, you can access them all under a single name.
MX	MX is the Mail eXchange record. This mainly deals with mail requests to mail servers (like POP3).
TXT	TXT is the text record which relate the domain name with a specific string. This is used to verify which DNS servers own a particular domain.