Resolving a DNS name

Raw IP addresses are very inconvenient for humans to perceive and remember, especially if they are IPv6 addresses. Take a look at 192.168.10.123 (IPv4) or 8fee:9930:4545:a:105:f8ff:fe21:67cf (IPv6). Remembering those sequences of numbers and letters could be a challenge for anyone.

To enable labeling the devices in a network with human-friendly names, the Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. In short, DNS is a distributed naming system that allows associating human-friendly names with devices in a computer network. A DNS name or a domain name is a string that represents a name of a device in the computer network.

To be precise, a DNS name is an alias for one or more IP addresses but not the devices. It doesn't name a particular ...

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