[CS-FSLUG] What if DNS goes down?

[Cia Watson]

Hi Ed,

ok, this is my first post to the group since joining a couple of weeks
ago. I was trying to get a simple NFS share going between my laptop
(Fedora 7) and pc (dual-boot CentOS 5.3 and Fedora 11); and I've given
up on that for the moment but -- it took a lot of time so I haven't yet
sent an intro for myself. So, ummmm... hi all! 

My basic understanding of the DNS issue is that every web site and
computer attached to the internet has it's own I.P. address. I won't go
into the whole public and private IP question, but internal networks
use what are called 'private I.P.'s' and the sites you visit on the web
as well as the I.P.'s used by your ISP are 'public IP's' 

What a 'nameserver' does is take the 'name' of the website (i.e.
ofb.biz) and match it with the actual I.P. address of that site. So if
you happen to know the I.P. numbers for a particular site, (and if it
doesn't change) you could actually enter that number in the address bar
of your browser rather than the 'name.com' of the site, and still get
to the same place IF it still exists. There are also websites to do DNS
lookups; and you can also do a ping from a terminal window to get the
I.P. of a particular website. For instance, I just did a ping of
ofb.biz and find the I.P. for that is: (208.43.84.98) -- use ctrl-c to
stop the ping... of course, when I entered http://208.43.84.98 I got to
a place-holder page for cPanel. So it's not a perfect method...

At any rate, the short answer is: if you know the I.P. address of the
web site then you don't need DNS -- but DNS does make it a lot easier!

Cia W





On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:25:01 -0500
"Ed Hurst" <ehurst at soulkiln.org> wrote:

> Trying to avoid the political implications here, I'm hoping we can
> stick to the topic: DNS service.
> 
> My knowledge is limited. Let's pretend for a moment some ruler
> decides for his country to "shut down the Net" the only way he knows
> -- kill the root DNS servers, or something similar.
> 
> For those running a namecaching server, that's not immediately a
> problem for their favorite sites. However, I am under the impression
> that server tries to renew/recheck now and then. Am I mistaken? Is
> there a way to prevent losing all your favorites if DNS disappears?
> 
> Feel free to ridicule my ignorance, but at least try to answer the
> main question. :-D
>