How Domain Name Servers Work

If you've ever used the Internet, it's a good bet that you've used the Domain Name System, or DNS, even without realizing it. DNS is a protocol within the set of standards for how computers exchange data on the Internet and on many private networks, known as the TCP/IP protocol suite. Its basic job is to turn a user-friendly domain name like "howstuffworks.com" into an Internet Protocol (IP) address like 70.42.251.42 that computers use to identify each other on the network. It's like your computer's GPS for the Internet. Computers and other network devices on the Internet use an IP address to route your request to the site you're trying to reach. This is similar to dialing a phone number to connect to the person you're trying to call. Thanks to DNS, though, you don't have to keep your own address book of IP addresses. Instead, you just connect through a domain name server, also called a DNS server or name server, which manages a massive database that maps domain names to IP addresses.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.[1] HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web. Hypertext is structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text. HTTP is the protocol to exchange or transfer hypertext. The standards development of HTTP was coordinated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), culminating in the publication of a series of Requests for Comments (RFCs), most notably RFC 2616 (June 1999), which defines HTTP/1.1, the version of HTTP in common use. HTTP functions as a request-response protocol in the client-server computing model. A web browser, for example, may be the client and an application running on a computer hosting a web site may be the server. The client submits an HTTP request message to the server. The server, which provides resources such as HTML files and other content, or performs other functions on behalf of the client, returns a response message to the client. The response contains completion status information about the request and may also contain requested content in its message body. A web browser is an example of a user agent (UA). Other types of user agent include the indexing software used by search providers (web crawlers), voice browsers, mobile apps and other software that accesses, consumes or displays web content.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite (IP), and is so common that the entire suite is often called TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, errorchecked delivery of a stream of octets between programs running on computers connected to a local area network, intranet or the public Internet. It resides at the transport layer. Web browsers use TCP when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web, and it is used to deliver email and transfer files from one location to another. Applications that do not require the reliability of a TCP connection may instead use the connectionless User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which emphasizes low-overhead operation and reduced latency rather than error checking and delivery validation. The protocol corresponds to the transport layer of TCP/IP suite. TCP provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol (IP). That is, when an application program desires to send a large chunk of data across the Internet using IP, instead of breaking the data into IP-sized pieces and issuing a series of IP requests, the software can issue a single request to TCP and let TCP handle the IP details. IP works by exchanging pieces of information called packets. A packet is a sequence of octets (bytes) and consists of a header followed by a body. The header describes the packet's source, destination and control information. The body contains the data IP is transmitting. Due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or other unpredictable network behavior, IP packets can be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests retransmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data, and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details. TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery, and therefore, TCP sometimes incurs relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order messages or retransmissions of lost messages. It is not particularly suitable for real-time applications such as Voice over IP. For such applications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) running over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are usually recommended instead.

USB DONGLE
Many devices smaller than a pack of gum can slip into the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port of a computer. These devices are called USB dongles and add features to the computer or machine that were not built in by the manufacturer. This can include the ability to connect to wireless networks, transfer data from the computer to the dongle, and increase a system's security.

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core members of the Internet protocol suite (the set of network protocols used for the Internet). With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network without prior communications to set up special transmission channels or data paths. The protocol was designed by David P. Reed in 1980 and formally defined in RFC 768. UDP uses a simple transmission model with a minimum of protocol mechanism.[1] It has no handshaking dialogues, and thus exposes any unreliability of the underlying network protocol to the user's program. As this is normally IP over unreliable media, there is no guarantee of delivery, ordering or duplicate protection. UDP provides checksums for data integrity, and port numbers for addressing different functions at the source and destination of the datagram.

UDP is suitable for purposes where error checking and correction is either not necessary or performed in the application, avoiding the overhead of such processing at the network interface level. Time-sensitive applications often use UDP because dropping packets is preferable to waiting for delayed packets, which may not be an option in a real-time system. A number of UDP's attributes make it especially suited for certain applications. It is transaction-oriented, suitable for simple query-response protocols such as the Domain Name System or the Network Time Protocol. It provides datagrams, suitable for modeling other protocols such as in IP tunneling or Remote Procedure Call and the Network File System. It is simple, suitable for bootstrapping or other purposes without a full protocol stack, such as the DHCP and Trivial File Transfer Protocol. It is stateless, suitable for very large numbers of clients, such as in streaming media applications for example IPTV The lack of retransmission delays makes it suitable for real-time applications such as Voice over IP, online games, and many protocols built on top of the Real Time Streaming Protocol. Works well in unidirectional communication, suitable for broadcast information such as in many kinds of service discovery and shared information such as broadcast time or Routing Information Protocol

High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC)

High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) is a bit-oriented code-transparent synchronous data link layer protocol developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The original ISO standards for HDLC are: ISO 3309 Frame Structure ISO 4335 Elements of Procedure ISO 6159 Unbalanced Classes of Procedure ISO 6256 Balanced Classes of Procedure The current standard for HDLC is ISO 13239, which replaces all of those standards. HDLC provides both connection-oriented and connectionless service. HDLC can be used for point to multipoint connections, but is now used almost exclusively to connect one device to another, using what is known as Asynchronous Balanced Mode (ABM). Framing HDLC frames can be transmitted over synchronous or asynchronous links. Those links have no mechanism to mark the beginning or end of a frame, so the beginning and end of each frame has to be identified. This is done by using a frame delimiter, or flag, which is a unique sequence of bits that is guaranteed not to be seen inside a frame.

Frame Relay
Frame Relay is a standardized wide area network technology that specifies the physical and logical link layers of digital telecommunications channels using a packet switching methodology. Originally designed for transport across Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) infrastructure, it may be used today in the context of many other network interfaces. Network providers commonly implement Frame Relay for voice (VoFR) and data as an encapsulation technique, used between local area networks (LANs) over a wide area network (WAN). Each end-user gets a private line (or leased line) to a Frame Relay node. The Frame Relay network handles the transmission over a frequently-changing path transparent to all end-user extensively-used WAN protocols. It is less expensive than leased lines and that is one reason for its popularity. The extreme simplicity of configuring user equipment in a Frame Relay network offers another reason for Frame Relay's popularity.

Synchronous Data Link Control (SDLC)

Synchronous Data Link Control (SDLC) is a computer communications protocol. It is the layer 2 protocol for IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA). SDLC supports multipoint links as well as error correction. It also runs under the assumption that an SNA header is present after the SDLC header.[1] SDLC was mainly used by IBM mainframe and midrange systems; however, implementations exist on many platforms from many vendors. The use of SDLC (and SNA) is becoming more and more rare, mostly replaced by IP-based protocols or being tunneled through IP (using AnyNet or other technologies)

control character
In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not in itself represent a written symbol. It is in-band signaling in the context of character encoding. All entries in the ASCII table below code 32 (technically the C0 control code set) and 127 are of this kind, including BEL (which is intended to cause an audible signal in the receiving terminal), SYN (which is a synchronization signal), and ENQ (a signal that is intended to trigger a response at the receiving end, to see if it is still present). The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) character set contains 65 control codes, including all of the ASCII control codes as well as additional codes which are mostly used to control IBM peripherals. Unicode makes a distinction between Control characters (C0 and C1 control codes) versus Formatting characters (such as the Zero-width non-joiner).

The control characters in ASCII still in common use include: 0 (null, NUL, \0, ^@), originally intended to be an ignored character, but now used by many programming languages to mark the end of a string. 7 (bell, BEL, \a, ^G), which may cause the device receiving it to emit a warning of some kind (usually audible). 8 (backspace, BS, \b, ^H), used either to erase the last character printed or to overprint it. 9 (horizontal tab, HT, \t, ^I), moves the printing position some spaces to the right. 10 (line feed, LF, \n, ^J), used as the end of line marker in most UNIX systems and variants. 11 (vertical tab, VT, \v, ^K), vertical tabulation. 12 (form feed, FF, \f, ^L), to cause a printer to eject paper to the top of the next page, or a video terminal to clear the screen.

13 (carriage return, CR, \r, ^M), used as the end of line marker in Mac OS, OS-9, FLEX (and variants). A carriage return/line feed pair is used by CP/M-80 and its derivatives including DOS and Windows, and by Application Layer protocols such as HTTP. 27 (escape, ESC, \e (GCC only), ^[). 127 (delete, DEL, ^?), originally intended to be an ignored character, but now used in some systems to erase a character. Also used by some Plan9 console programs to send an interrupt note to the current process.

bit stuffing
In data transmission and telecommunication, bit stuffing (also knownuncommonlyas positive justification) is the insertion of non information bits into data. Stuffed bits should not be confused with overhead bits. Bit stuffing is used for various purposes, such as for bringing bit streams that do not necessarily have the same or rationally related bit rates up to a common rate, or to fill buffers or frames. The location of the stuffing bits is communicated to the receiving end of the data link, where these extra bits are removed to return the bit streams to their original bit rates or form. Bit stuffing may be used to synchronize several channels before multiplexing or to rate-match two single channels to each other.

HyperText Markup Language

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for creating web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser. The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages.

uniform resource locator

A uniform resource locator, abbreviated URL, also known as web address, is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to a resource. In most web browsers, the URL of a web page is displayed on top inside an address bar. An example of a typical URL would be "http://en.example.org/wiki/Main_Page". A URL is technically a type of uniform resource identifier (URI), but in many technical documents and verbal discussions, URL is often used as a synonym for URI, and this is not considered a problem.

The Internet Protocol (IP)

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the principal communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP, as the primary protocol in the Internet layer of the Internet protocol suite, has the task of delivering packets from the source host to the destination host solely based on the IP addresses in the packet headers. For this purpose, IP defines packet structures that encapsulate the data to be delivered. It also defines addressing methods that are used to label the datagram with source and destination information. Historically, IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974; the other being the connection-oriented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet protocol suite is therefore often referred to as TCP/IP. The first major version of IP, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), is the dominant protocol of the internet. Its successor is Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6).