Introduction:

Imagine you needed to call a friend, but instead of using their name, you had to memorize their phone number each time. This would quickly become complicated if you had dozens or even hundreds of contacts. On the Internet, it's a bit the same: every website is actually an IP address, a series of numbers that's hard to remember. That's where DNS (Domain Name System) comes in, a service that acts like an online directory, translating human-understandable domain names like hwiki.xyz into IP addresses, enabling browsers to find and display sites.

A DNS (Domain Name System) service converts a domain name into an IP address.

Example: google.com -> 172.217.168.206

DNS resolution :

DNS resolution is hierarchical in the form of a tree.

en.wikipedia.org

• .: Root domain
• org: First Level Domain
• wikipedia: Second Level Domain
• en: Subdomain

Conversion process (simplified):

1. The user asks the recursive* DNS server for the IP address of hwiki.xyz (A recursive DNS is a DNS server that communicates with several other DNS servers).
2. The server asks the server containing all .xyz domains if it has the top-level domain hwiki. So hwiki in the .xyz server.
3. The DNS returns the IP address associated with hwiki.xyz to the user.

A domain hwiki.xyz reads “hwiki at xyz”.

DNS table :

Of course, domain-to-IP conversion doesn't happen every time a user wants to access a site. A user will first go to hwiki.xyz and then record the corresponding IP address in a “DNS table”.

To access this DNS table, and view its contents on Windows, simply execute the command :

ipconfig /displaydns

To empty its contents, simply run the command :

ipconfig /flushdns