Chapter 5. DNS: what’s in a name?
As your website grows and more people discover it, I’m sure you won’t be satisfied with having to identify it by its IP address indefinitely. A nice, easy-to-remember name like, say, best-site-ever.com will work much better. Let’s make that upgrade right now.
Under all those bright, cheerful web pages with external links displayed as softly chiseled 3D boxes and identified by catchy, easy-to-remember names, it’s all about numbers. There’s no real place called google.com or wikipedia.org; rather, they’re 172.217.3.142 and 208.80.154.224. The software that does all the work connecting us to the websites we know and love recognizes only numeric IP addresses.
The tool that translates back and forth between text-mad humans and our more digitally oriented machines is called the domain name system (DNS). Domain is a word often used to describe a distinct group of networked resources—in particular, resources identified by a unique name like, oh, I don’t know, manning.com. As shown in figure 5.1, whenever you enter a text address in your browser, the services of a DNS server are invariably—and invisibly—sought.
