The purpose of DNS

Domain Name System (DNS) is similar to Active Directory in that it is a structured database that is often stored on domain controller servers and distributed automatically around your network to other domain controller/DNS servers. Where an AD database contains information about the domain objects themselves, DNS is responsible for storing and resolving all of the names on your network. What do I mean by names? Whenever a user or computer tries to contact any resource by calling for a name, DNS is the platform responsible for turning that name into something else in order to get the traffic to the correct destination. You see, the way that traffic gets from the client to the server is via networking, and typically via the TCP/IP stack, using an IP address to get to its destination. When I open an application on my computer to access some data that resides on a server, I could configure the application so that it communicates directly to my server by using the server...