Explain Like I'm Five

DNS is like a phone book for the internet.

Computers on the internet have IP addresses which are numbers like 104.26.9.209. Nobody really wants to remember dozens or even hundreds of those so we also give them names like lemmy.world which are a lot easier to remember. DNS is a service that you can ask "Hey, what's the IP address for lemmy.world?" and you get a reply like "You can reach lemmy.world under 104.26.9.209, 104.26.8.209 and 172.67.71.35. You may remember those for 256 seconds. After that, better ask me again in case they have moved."

In reality, it's a tiny bit more complex. For example, you can ask for different kinds of information, not just IP addresses and DNS servers talk to each other to efficiently distribute changes across the internet.

phonebook for internet

It's like the Squid Game challenge where the team has to cross a bridge and they don't know which plate is safe and which will break. When a plate breaks, it turns out to be DNS.

Kinda like the contacts app on your phone. You search for a person by name and it gives you their phone number.

Web address are like a contact name. They partly exist to make it easier for humans to remember them. Computers don't use the contact name to get a website, they need the phone number (known as an 'IP address').

When you go to pornhub.com in your browser, the computer sends that address - or contact name - to a DNS server. The server looks through its records for that contact name (web address) and replies with the contact's phone number (IP address). Your browser then uses that to fetch the website for you, and you get to spank it to clown porn.

What does it do? It do be a pain in the ass, sometimes.

A DNS server translates between addresses and hostnames. It makes it possible to tell a program to connect to example.com, and DNS translates it into 104.20.23.154

DNS = Domain Name System

Computers talk in computer language. When they need to contact one another, they use an address to find each other, like we use addresses to find our homes or businesses on a map. Theirs is called an IP address, or Internet Protocol address. It's a series of numbers (and sometimes letters) that computers recognize as an address on the Internet.

But to humans, IP addresses are complex jumbles of numbers and letters. If you want to go to Google's website, you might type in one of their many IP addresses (e.g. 216.58.198.46, or 2a00:1450:400e:808::200e), but how are you ever going to remember all that nonsense? And for every single individual website?!

Instead, you can remember a simple little URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, that's quick and easy to recall: google.com.

DNS is a process that keeps track of all IP addresses and their associated hostnames (or URLs) and will translate between the two of them on the fly. For example, you tell your computer you want to go to amazon.com and DNS will tell the computer to track down 98.82.161.185.

TL;DR - DNS translates between human web addresses and computer web addresses, so us humans can communicate with our computers and receive information from across the Internet.

Bonus: Google secured a very simple IP address long ago, so even humans can remember how to find them: 8.8.8.8. I worked in an IT field for 20 years, managing a DNS server (along with dozens of other servers and thousands of personal computers). If the DNS server ever went down, we'd use that simple IP address to get to Google's website so we could search for answers while troubleshooting. To this day, it's the only public IP address I still remember.

You say "give me xyz.com" it looks up what the IP address is for that domain so your computer can request it.

Imagine how you look up a website as calling someone from a phone number, but everyone can only use addresses that go like 123.45.67.89. You can always call them through there, but that would be really hard to memorize. DNS gives dynamic names to these numbers, so when you ask for google.com; they take the request before and say "oh, google.com? That links to this number, so here you go"

There is a company called WHOIS that is entirely dedicated to keep records of this name list, but not all DNS's use it fully, as an example when adblocking DNS's gets told to pull something from a site that has ads, the DNS doesnt give the number of ad services back to the browser, but gives the rest of them. As a result, you do not see the ads.

Translates numbers to familiar names controlled by elites so we peasants can't have nice names.

you have an address: city, street number... you could give to people the gps coordinates for it, latitude and longitude, but it's easier to use the address.

In the same way, computers on the internet have an ip address, such as 192.168.1.1, but it's easier to use a domain such as hello.com

DNS is the service translating between domains and ip addresses. Since it can store some information, it's also used to verify things for example for emails.

this 👉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System