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Name Servers

A set of servers called domain name servers (DNS) maps the human-readable names to the IP addresses. These servers are simple databases that map names to IP addresses, and they are distributed all over the Internet. Most individual companies, ISPs and universities maintain small name servers to map host names to IP addresses. There are also central name servers that use data supplied by VeriSign to map domain names to IP addresses.

If you type the URL “http://www.howstuffworks.com/web-server.htm” into your browser, your browser extracts the name “www.howstuffworks.com,” passes it to a domain name server, and the domain name server returns the correct IP address for www.howstuffworks.com. A number of name servers may be involved to get the right IP address. For example, in the case of www.howstuffworks.com, the name server for the “com” top-level domain will know the IP address for the name server that knows host names, and a separate query to that name server, operated by the HowStuffWorks ISP, may deliver the actual IP address for the HowStuffWorks server machine.

On a UNIX machine, you can access the same service using the nslookup command. Simply type a name like “www.howstuffworks.com” into the command line, and the command will query the name servers and deliver the corresponding IP address to you.

So here it is: The Internet is made up of millions of machines, each with a unique IP address. Many of these machines are server machines, meaning that they provide services to other machines on the Internet. You have heard of many of these servers: e-mail servers, Web servers, FTP servers, Gopher servers and Telnet servers, to name a few. All of these are provided by server machines.

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IP Addresses

To keep all of these machines straight, each machine on the Internet is assigned a unique address called an IP address. IP stands for Internet protocol, and these addresses are 32-bit numbers, normally expressed as four “octets” in a “dotted decimal number.” A typical IP address looks like this:

216.27.61.137

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets because they can have values between 0 and 255, which is 2^8 possibilities per octet.

Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address. A server has a static IP address that does not change very often. A home machine that is dialing up through a modem often has an IP address that is assigned by the ISP when the machine dials in. That IP address is unique for that session — it may be different the next time the machine dials in. This way, an ISP only needs one IP address for each modem it supports, rather than for each customer.

If you are working on a Windows machine, you can view a lot of the Internet information for your machine, including your current IP address and hostname, with the command WINIPCFG.EXE (IPCONFIG.EXE for Windows 2000/XP). On a UNIX machine, type nslookup at the command prompt, along with a machine name, like www.howstuffworks.com — e.g. “nslookup www.howstuffworks.com” — to display the IP address of the machine, and you can use the command hostname to learn the name of your machine.

As far as the Internet’s machines are concerned, an IP address is all you need to talk to a server. For example, in your browser, you can type the URL http://209.116.69.66 and arrive at the machine that contains the Web server for HowStuffWorks. On some servers, the IP address alone is not sufficient, but on most large servers it is — keep reading for details.

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