A hierarchical naming system used for computers, resources, or any services connected to a private network or the internet is called the Domain Name System (DNS). It is used to associate various information for domain names which are assigned to each of the participants in the network. It translates the domain names to meaningful numerical identifiers (binary) which can be easily understood by humans enabling them to locate and connect to these addresses anywhere in the world. A good and often used analogy to understand Domain Name System is to think of it as a ‘phone book’ of the internet, which translates computer host names into Internet Protocol addresses. Example www.howany.com translates to 216.75.9.92.
Enabling people and applications to lookup addresses and records in the DNS table is the primary purpose of a DNS server. Most of the DNS servers in the world are private which means they can only be accessed by the internal network, that is, providing service only to the people inside the organizations who maintain or own them. Only a few DNS on the internet enable resolutions for any person who request it. Such Domain Name Servers are popularly called ‘Public DNS servers’. Most of the DNS servers which are public are public on purpose although some might have been accidentally mis configured by the system administrator. Such DNS servers are usually fixed quickly.
To find your DNS you can follow these steps.
- For *nix users (Linux/UNIX/Mac systems)
The C library contains a set of resolvers that are there to provide access to DNS on the internet. The resolver routines reads information from the resolver configuration file whenever they are invoked by any process.
To see the address of your DNS server first type the following command in the shell prompt.
$ sudo cat /etc/resolv.conf
Alternatively you can type
$ sudo less /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 119.24.1.42
nameserver 229.24.1.43
Where,
the nameserver 119.24.1.42 : is the nameserver IP address that the resolver should query. Every application that connects to the internet will use this particular IP address for DNS purpose.
- For windows users (Vista/NT/XP/2003 systems)
Click on the start menu and then click on run. Type in cmd and press the enter key to open up the command prompt (the run window can also be opened using the shortcut Winkey+R).
Now type in the following command in the open DOS prompt
C:>ipconfig /all
This command should show you your DNS server IP address and a lot of other information (IP address etc) related to networking on Windows.
Alternatively
Click on Start button and then go to settings. Navigate to network connections (also present in the control panel). Now double click on the Local Area Connection (or whichever is your primary internet connection). Click on the properties button. Select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) option. Once again click on the properties and look for the preferred DNS server. It should open a box with your configuration which will display you DNS server.
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