Chapter 13: Diving into DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) converts a human-readable hostname into an Internet Protocol (IP) address. It is one of the most common application layer protocols in use today and is essential to any network. In this chapter, we'll review the purpose of DNS along with a brief history so that you can better understand how it all began. We'll then cover the different types of servers, such as root, authoritative, and recursive. Additionally, we'll compare how DNS records are transported when resolving an IP address versus updating the zone file.
To get a better understanding of this protocol, we'll review some of the common types and classes of Resource Records (RRs). We'll also examine the DNS packet structure by drilling down into the header and query sections using Wireshark. You'll be able to recognize key field values such as the transaction Identification (ID) and header flags. In addition, you'll be able to break...