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Internet

What is Domain Name Server?

Domain name servers, or DNS, are an very important but completely hidden part of the Internet, and they are fascinating. The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active distributed databases on the planet. Without DNS, the Internet would shut down very quickly.
Human-readable names are easy for people to remember, but they don't do machines any good. All of the machines use names called IP addresses to refer to one another. Every time you use a domain name, you use the Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable IP address. During a day of browsing and e-mailing, you might access the domain name servers hundreds of times!
Domain name servers translate domain names to IP addresses.
The DNS system is a database, and no other database on the planet gets this many requests. No other database on the planet has millions of people changing it every day, either. That is what makes the DNS system so unique.
IP Addresses
To keep all of the machines on the Internet straight, each machine 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."

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets because they can have values between 0 and 256 (28 possibilities per octet).

Every machine on the Internet has its own 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 you dial in. That IP address is unique for your session and may be different the next time you dial in. In this way, an ISP only needs one IP address for each modem it supports, rather than for every customer.

If you are working on a Windows machine, you can view your current IP address with the command WINIPCFG.EXE (IPCONFIG.EXE for Windows 2000/XP). On a UNIX machine, type nslookup along with a machine name (such as "nslookup www.howstuffworks.com") to display the IP address of the machine (use the command hostname to learn the name of your machine).