DNS For The Rest Of Us: It's Like Magic!

DNS is the backbone of the internet, and without it life just wouldn't be the same. But for most of us it's just the magic that happens behind the scenes.

It's one of those subjects that very few ordinary desktop users really understand. Everyone knows that we make requests to view a website in a browser, that request goes off into the internet, and almost like magic,
the website appears in our browser.

Most of the time we don't need to know much more. Unless, of course, you need to troubleshoot your internet connection, benchmark the speed of alternative DNS servers, or even take advantage of some of the features, such as parental controls, that are available with some free public DNS providers.

This video doesn't attempt to provide a highly technical overview of DNS, just a DNS 101 for the rest of us. Starting with a brief overview of what
it actually is and how it works, I take a look at some of the tools we can use to query and benchmark DNS, and finish up by discussing Dynamic DNS.

I Hope you all enjoy the video and find it useful.

Ramble on!!!

The tools I mention in the video are:

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[Coopertronics]

A most excellent topic dude. A couple of years ago I ran into a problem with transmitting the internet down to the shed at the bottom of the garden. The problem I was that, even though I could get good connectivity over wireless, websites would not load on the first try. I would have to refresh the page, sometimes more than once, to be able to view the page. I did a little investigation and found that it was the DNS resolution that was taking too long to ping off my ISP. I solved this by buying two Raspberry Pi Zero W modules and set them up as local DNS cache using bind9, just for the shed. After I had installed them and pointed the DHCP to them I could almost instantly connect to any website. It's well worth the effort to setup if you are having issues with websites not loading in.

[walter_lesaulnier]

Your explanatory videos are the BEST! Thank you! I'm a Windows user that is learning Manjaro on a 2nd PC so your Arch related videos are priceless to me! And you have a wonderful voice!

[BrucesWorldofStuff]

Thanks OTB for the Magic Information.... :- ) I did know some of this and to this day I still think it is Magic... Lol
I remember when the internet was a newborn. There was sometimes in the BBS days you would get a IP number to something in a message back then because the DNS was just as new but the IP number worked worked in Netscape... It was all new and folks said, "That Internet thing will never make it. BBS's will live forever..." A couple of years after the internet was going the BBS's started to go away as everyone stopped using them. I know I ran one for 4 years... So Sad... :-(
Thanks again for the video!
LLAP

[mlong]

Nice presentation of some useful 101 content. Thanks Steve!

[jmartin]

Very well explained, thank you! There is one thing I was wondering about when I saw that dig, host, ... return the IPv4 when you give them a url like "archlinux.org". If I am not mistaken, wasn't the reason for introducing IPv6 that you just cannot resolve the whole net with IPv4 because it has far too few addresses. How can dig or host then give you for each url an IPv4 that seems to identify the according server?

[Hyperboid]

3:40 Well, we _typically_ put in the name of the site.
edit: deep web browsing dark web browsing dank web browsing

[mondskiez]

If you guys want to benchmark if your DNS is stiffling your surfing, try this.. works in Windows and Linux via Wine

[LDWilliams]

Just out of interest is there any way to see the separate stages and addresses that are needed for you to access an address?
As in which recursive server, root server, TLD server, authoritative nameserver gets asked each time?

[peterjansen]

dig is not installed on Arch by default.

[Wayne_Stream]

anything that points to yale is the DNS of Yale University

[pepeshopping]

Incorrect:

The DNS configured in your router DOES NOT affect every device in your network!

It ONLY affects the devices using DHCP.
Any device configured with their own DNS will NOT even know you changed it on the router!