CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ipnameservers
blacktie24
blacktie24

Reputation: 5075

How are nameserver addresses resolved?

So if I try to navigate to google.com and I don't have the ip address cached, my browser will attempt to contact google's nameservers. If the nameserver is ns1.google.com, how exactly is the nameserver's ip address resolved?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 179

Answers (1)

lreeder
lreeder

Reputation: 12206

Your browser doesn't contact Google's nameservers directly (unless you work there), instead it attempts to contact your organization's DNS servers (as defined by your ISP or network admins) to resolve google.com, and those DNS servers work from there, working their way up the DNS hierarchy to the DNS root servers if necessary.

How do the DNS root servers know the IP addresses for Google's servers? They don't. They look at the ".com" in the domain name, and forward the request to the ".com" TLD servers, currently managed by Verisign. Verisign notes the ".google" part of the domain name, and forwards the request to Google's DNS servers.

How does Verisign know the IP address of Google's DNS servers? Google tells them by registering resource DNS records with them when the IP address changes.

Of course, caching is used up and down all levels of this tree.

See http://www.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm for more info.

Upvotes: 2

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