Archive for April, 2008
While checking my email late night, I got a request to write something about “how internet works”. This reaction resulted from my previous article on Uses And Limitations Of The Internet – At Glance
This email was from a Mauritian and I was amazed since I rarely find any Mauritian interacting on my blog considering that I’m a Mauritian too. I thank “this guy” for his time and consideration to contact me and I hope to get more requests about topics to write about.
From the information that I read from the email, I guess I will go straight into technical details.. So, here we go for a small explanation on our subject:
NOTE: As you can see from the picture above, each arrow are numbered. This is important since they denote ordered steps as detailed below:
Consider for instance that you want to access the site http://wakish.info which resides on a server, just as any website or object that you want to access on the net.
1) The Browser, for example firefox, (from your pc – aka client pc) contacts a DNS Server to get the required IP address of the domain name wakish.info
(recall that all address names are stored as numbers (IP). These numbers are given names for humans to be able to read and remember them)
2) The DNS Server* searches for the IP address and returns it back to your browser
3) The Browser can then contact the Web Server where wakish.info resides to get access to that website
4) The Web Server, in turn, locates the requested page of wakish.info on its storage space
5) Once found, the Web Server returns the web page to the browser
6) The browser assembles the response and displays the page in a human readable format so that you can undertand it 
Additional Remark:
* The DNS system in its own, forms a network of its alikes. So, if one DNS server does not know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one and so on, until the correct IP address is returned
That’s it Feel to add and comment on what I have been explaining above..
What’s Next:
=> Upload your own image on the Internet, can you?
=> Domain transfer, did you know how this is actually done?
=> robots.txt – why it this simple file still so widely used?
=> Website Customization: What can you do to improve the layout of your blog or website?
=> How Do Search Engines Work – Web Crawlers / Web Spiders
