What is a name server, what is a network domain, and how are the two related?
In: Technology
Sorry if this gets rambly; I’m at the stage where I intuitively know what these things are, but explaining them in ways that make some amount of sense is challenging.
Domains are an abstraction that tells us what groups of computers have some degree of connectivity to each other. The form of this that most people will be familiar with is your standard corporate or education network; on a hardware level you have one or more main lines out to the outside world, and these have routers in front of them; then the routers connect to special servers called *Domain Controllers* that handle functions like IP address assignments and authentication and holding an authoritative directory of computers and users on the network. If you’re hired by a new place and they give you some form of a “corporate login” then they’re probably adding a user account for you on some sort of domain controller.
The domain generally has a name, and some networks can have multiple domains that may or may not be able to see each other, but (importantly) the IP assignments and authentication from other domains won’t work there.
Another place we don’t think about domains, are the sites we use daily. Reddit.com is what’s called the *domain name* for a site that is open to the entire internet, and every server in the Reddit domain is under this hierarchy.
Name servers, or Domain Name Servers, have a particular function that is most evident when talking about domains like reddit.com: making your computer know where you want to go when you type “reddit.com” into your browser. At the most basic level it’s a huge table with one side being the network address of the computer, and the right side being the “friendly” name that humans can remember. This happened because, funnily enough, most people didn’t want to keep a list of IP addresses for their favorite websites, and companies who wanted to use websites for marketing purposes found that it was much easier getting people to visit a site like “microsoft.com” than “66.248.19.154” for instance (note: no idea where that IP leads, investigate at your own risk)
Back to your work domain, this gets used if your work has specific sites like a work intranet page with internal tools for your job, or even just an online company newsletter; in this case anyone on the domain for, say, widgets inc, can put “widgetnet” into a browser and get to the internal widgetnet page, or say “payroll” for HR to be taken to the server that hosts the payroll software; these are very customizable and (importantly) not routable from the internet in general; you generally have to be inside that domain to access it.
Hopefully that’s a somewhat decent explanation.
Name server converts domain names (reddit.com) to IP addresses (xx.xx.xx.xx) so your computer can communicate with it, it also allows content for one domain name to be hosted on multiple IP’s or have its IP change without everyone needing to remember a string of numbers.
Network domain is typically the internal domain name. In a work environment this may be the the companies name. A printer on this network/domain might be called ‘printer1.companyName’. In turn the internal name server would be able to resolve this to the IP of that printer.
So a name server is like a telephone book, it takes the name of a website and converts that information into a usable IP address which is an internet protocol series of numbers like 8.8.8.8 which is used in this case to connect to Google.com
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