2007-07-18 23:17:49 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Computer Networking
DNS is the mechanism used to turn human-friendly names, such as answers.yahoo.com, into machine-friendly IP addresses, such as 209.73.187.220. Those human-friendly names are called host names, and the main job of DNS is to provide a way to look-up the IP address[s] associated with any given host name
Imagine needing to remember the IP address for every web site you use. (The part in between http:// and the first / in a URL is a host name.)
And email addresses too, guess what the part to the right of the @ is, in an email address? If you said "host name" score a bonus point for you!
-MM
2007-07-18 23:56:58 · answer #1 · answered by Random Malefactor 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
To put it in very simple terms, DNS is used to convert human readable names, like www.yahoo.com, into numeric format that computers can understand.
Without DNS you'd need to know that www.yahoo.com was actually 69.147.114.210 and if you wanted to get to Yahoo, you'd have to enter http://69.147.114.210 into your browser every time you wanted to go there.
Actually, since Yahoo is so big they have a number of servers in addition to that one. You can also get there at http://209.191.93.52 among others. DNS allows Yahoo to share the load among a number of servers both for load sharing as well as redundancy. If one should go down, and it happens, others can pick up the load.
2007-07-19 00:03:22 · answer #2 · answered by Bostonian In MO 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
DNS is domain name server, it is used for identifying networked pc. by name or by i.p. address
2007-07-18 23:36:51 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋