What is IP address?
(Internet Protocol address) is, to put it simply, a computer address that specific electronic devices use to identify and communicate with one another on a computer network using the Internet Protocol standard (IP). Any participating network device, such as a router, computer, time server, printer, Internet fax machine, or certain telephones, is capable of having a distinct address.
The Difference
For a computer or other network device on the Internet, an IP address can be compared to a street address or a phone number (contrast VoIP, voice over (the) internet protocol). An IP address can be used to uniquely identify a particular computer or other network device on a network, just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a particular building or telephone. However, an IP address is distinct from other forms of contact information because the connection between a user’s IP address and name is not made public.
Because they are a part of a shared hosting web server environment or because a Network Address Translator (NAT) or proxy server acts as an intermediary agent on behalf of its clients, IP addresses may appear to be shared by multiple client devices. In these situations, the real originating IP addresses may be concealed from the server receiving a request. Using a NAT to conceal a large number of IP addresses in a private address space, as defined by RFC 1918, is a common practice. This address space is a block that cannot be routed on the open Internet. Only the “outside” interface(s) of the NAT must have addresses that can be routed over the Internet.
The NAT device typically maps individual private addresses on the inside to TCP or UDP port numbers on the outside. The port numbers are site-specific extensions to an IP address, much like there may be site-specific extensions on a phone number.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) manages and assigns IP addresses . Super-blocks are typically given by the IANA to Regional Internet Registries, who then give out smaller blocks to businesses and Internet service providers.
What is DNS Address?
The Domain Name System (DNS) on the Internet links various types of information to so-called domain names; most significantly, it acts as the Internet’s “phone book” by translating human-readable computer hostnames, such as en.wikipedia.org, into the IP addresses required by networking hardware for information delivery. Additionally, it keeps a list of mail exchange servers that accept email for a specific domain. The Domain Name System is a crucial part of modern Internet usage because it offers a global keyword-based redirection service.
What is DNS Use For?
DNS’s most fundamental function is to convert hostnames to IP addresses. In the simplest terms, it is similar to a phone book. The Domain Name System, for instance, can be used to tell you what the internet address is for en.wikipedia.org, which is 66.230.200.100. DNS is also used for other crucial things.
Prior to the physical routing hierarchy represented by the IP address, DNS enables the assignment of Internet destinations to the human organization or concern they represent. Due to the ability to use a human-readable form (such as “wikipedia.org”) rather than an IP address, hyperlinks and Internet contact information can remain consistent regardless of the IP routing configuration in use (such as 66.230.200.100).
The Abuse
People abuse this by reciting meaningful URLs and email addresses without considering how the computer will find them.
By allowing an authoritative server for each domain to keep track of its own changes and avoiding the need to constantly check with a central registrar, the Domain Name System distributes the burden of assigning domain names and mapping them to IP networks.
History :
Even before TCP/IP, back in the days of the ARPAnet, it was common practice to use a name as a more readable abstraction of a machine’s network address. However, a different system was employed at the time because DNS was not created until 1983, just after TCP/IP was put into use. With the previous setup, every computer on the network would download a file from an SRI computer called HOSTS.TXT (now SRI International). The HOSTS.TXT file converted names to numerical addresses.
On the majority of contemporary operating systems, a hosts file still exists by default or can be configured, allowing users to specify an IP address (such as 192.0.34.166) to use for a hostname (such as www.example.net) without consulting DNS. As of 2006, the hosts file is mostly used to diagnose DNS issues or to map local addresses to more natural names. Systems based on a hosts file have inherent limitations because it is obvious that each computer that wants to communicate with another computer must update its hosts file whenever the address of that computer changes.
Scalable System
A more scalable system was required due to the expansion of networking, one that only kept track of changes to a host’s address in one location. By dynamically informing other hosts of the change via a notification system, a network of all hosts’ names and associated IP addresses would be completed.
Paul Mockapetris created the Domain Name System in 1983 and wrote the first implementation at Jon Postel’s request. In RFC 882 and 883, the original specifications are documented. When RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 were published in 1987, they updated the DNS specification and rendered RFC 882 and RFC 883 obsolete. The core DNS protocols have been extended in a number of more recent RFCs in various ways.
The first UNIX implementation was created in 1984 by four Berkeley students: Songnian Zhou, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Douglas Terry. Ralph Campbell continued to maintain it after that. The DNS implementation was significantly rewritten and given the new name BIND by DEC’s Kevin Dunlap in 1985. (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, previously: Berkeley Internet Name Daemon). Since then, BIND has been maintained by Mike Karels, Phil Almquist, and Paul Vixie. In the early 1990s, BIND was ported to the Windows NT operating system.
Since BIND has a long history of vulnerabilities and exploits, several substitute nameserver/resolver programs have been developed and made available.
How DNS Work In The Theory
A tree of domain names makes up the domain name space. In the tree, each node or branch has one or more resource records that contain data pertaining to the domain name. Zones are divided within the tree. A zone is made up of a group of linked nodes that are served authoritatively by a DNS nameserver. (Remember that one nameserver can host a number of zones.)
A system administrator may assign control to another administrator so that the latter may manage a portion of the domain name space that falls within his or her sphere of influence. By doing this, a portion of the old zone is divided into a new zone that is under the control of the nameservers of the second administrator.When something falls under the purview of the new zone, the old zone loses its authority.
A resolver searches for the data related to nodes. In order to communicate with name servers, a resolver knows how to send DNS requests and pay attention to DNS responses. In order to find the required information, resolving typically involves iterating through several name servers.
Some resolvers perform rudimentary operations and can only connect to a single name server. These straightforward resolvers depend on a recursing name server to do the work of information discovery for them.
What is IPv4?
The fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP), known as version 4, is also the protocol’s most widely used iteration. Aside from IPv6, IPv4 is the only protocol used on the Internet and is the preeminent network layer protocol.
It is described in IETF RFC 791, which superseded RFC 760 in September 1981. (January 1980). As MIL-STD-1777, it was also standardized by the US Department of Defense.
On a packet-switched network, IPv4 is a data-oriented protocol (e.g., Ethernet). It is a “best effort” protocol because delivery is not guaranteed. There are no assurances given regarding the accuracy of the data, and duplicate or out-of-order packets could result. An upper layer protocol addresses these issues (e.g., TCP, and partly by UDP).
For two computers to be able to uniquely identify one another when communicating over the Internet, IP is designed to provide unique global computer addressing.
Addressing :
There are only 4,294,967,296 unique addresses that can be used with IPv4 because it uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses. Others, like the 18 million private network addresses and the 1 million multicast addresses, are reserved for specific uses. As a result, fewer addresses are available for use as public Internet addresses. An IPv4 address shortage seems inevitable as the number of available addresses is used up, but Network Address Translation (NAT) has significantly postponed this inevitable.
This restriction has encouraged the push for IPv6, which is the only IPv4 replacement candidate currently in use and in its early stages of deployment.
Allocation :
Originally, the IP address was divided into two parts:
* Network id : first octet
* Host id : last three octets
The result was a cap of 256 networks. This was quickly recognized to be insufficient as the networks were allocated.
Different classes of network were established to get around this restriction, and this system later came to be known as classful networking. There were five classes made (A, B, C, D, & E), three of which (A, B, & C) had various network field lengths. Each of these three network classes had a different maximum number of hosts because the remaining address field was used to identify a host on that network. As a result, there were some networks with a large number of host addresses and many networks with few addresses. Class D was for multicast addresses, and class E was set aside for special purposes.
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
Around 1993, a Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) scheme took the place of these classes, and the earlier one was dubbed “classful.” The main benefit of CIDR is that it enables the re-division of Class A, B, and C networks, allowing for the allocation of smaller (or larger) blocks of addresses to different entities, such as Internet service providers or their clients, or Local Area Networks.
It is not random how an address is actually assigned. The cornerstone of routing is the idea that an address encodes data about a device’s position within a network. This suggests that a network address assigned to one area won’t work in another area of the network. The assignment of Internet addresses globally is controlled by a hierarchical structure developed by CIDR and supervised by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and its Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). In order to provide information about IP address assignments, each RIR maintains a publicly searchable WHOIS database. Data from these databases is a key component of many tools that try to locate IP addresses geographically.
What is IPv6?
A network layer protocol for packet-switched networks is Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). For widespread use on the Internet, it is intended to replace IPv4, the most recent version of the Internet Protocol.
The primary enhancement provided by IPv6 is a significantly expanded address space that permits more flexibility in addressing. For each of the approximately 6.5 billion[1] people alive today, IPv6 could support 2128 (or 3.41038) addresses, or about 51028 addresses. However, the IPv6 designers did not intend to assign a permanent unique address to each person or computer. Instead, the longer address length eliminates the requirement for network address translation to prevent address exhaustion and makes address assignment and renumbering when switching providers easier.
Introduction :
By the early 1990s, it was evident that additional changes to IPv4 were required because the switch to a classless network implemented a decade earlier was insufficient to prevent IPv4 address exhaustion.[2] By the fall of 1993, the IETF announced a call for white papers (RFC 1550) and the formation of the “IP, the Next Generation” (IPng Area) of working groups.[2][3]
As a result of the creation of several “IP Next Generation” (IPng) working groups, IPng was adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force on July 25, 1994. By 1996, a number of RFCs defining IPv6 had been published, beginning with RFC 2460. (Incidentally, IPv5 wasn’t meant to be the replacement for IPv4, but rather an experimental flow-oriented streaming protocol that could handle both audio and video.)
Features of IPv6
In many ways, IPv6 is a cautious extension of IPv4. With the exception of applications protocols that embed network-layer addresses, most transport- and application-layer protocols can be used with IPv6 without much or any modification (such as FTP or NTPv3).
To run over IPv6, however, applications typically require only minor adjustments and a recompile.
#1. Larger address space :
The larger address space of IPv6, which is 128 bits long compared to 32 bits in IPv4, is the primary aspect of IPv6 that is accelerating adoption at the moment.
The larger address space prevents the IPv4 address space from potentially running out without the use of network address translation (NAT) or other devices that disrupt end-to-end Internet traffic. Although NAT may occasionally still be required, Internet engineers are attempting to avoid it whenever possible because they are aware that it will be challenging in IPv6. Additionally, by eliminating the need for complicated subnetting schemes, it simplifies the administration of medium-sized and large networks. Subnetting should, in theory, return to its original function of logically segmenting an IP network for the best possible access and routing.
The disadvantage of the large address size is that IPv6 uses more bandwidth than IPv4, which may be detrimental to areas with limited bandwidth (header compression can sometimes be used to alleviate this problem). Although even IPv4 addresses are much more difficult to remember than DNS names, IPv6 addresses are more difficult to remember than IPv4 addresses. IPv6 and IPv4 support has been added to DNS protocols.
#2. Stateless auto configuration of hosts :
When a host is connected to a routed IPv6 network, the hosts’ configuration can be done automatically. When a host connects to a network for the first time, it sends a link-local multicast request for its configuration settings. If routers are configured properly, they respond to this request with a router advertisement packet that contains network-layer configuration settings.
A host can use stateful autoconfiguration (DHCPv6) or be manually configured if IPv6 autoconfiguration is not appropriate. Only hosts should use stateless autoconfiguration; routers must be set up manually or using another method.
IPv6 scope
Three unicast address scopes are specified by IPv6: global, site, and link.
Non-link-local addresses known as “site-local addresses” are valid only within the boundaries of an administratively defined site and are not transferable outside of it.
Only link-local addresses can be used to create ICMP Redirect Messages [ND] and as next-hop addresses in the majority of routing protocols, according to companion IPv6 specifications.
Due to these limitations, an IPv6 router is required to have a link-local next-hop address for all directly connected routes (routes for which the given router and the next-hop router share a common subnet prefix).
Where to Find Your IP Address, IP4, IP6 and DNS Address
IP Info: link http://www.ip-adress.com
IPv4, DNS, IPv6 : link: http://www.iplobster.com
IP Address: link ttps://whatismyipaddress.com
How can I find my DNS server?
There are a few ways to find your DNS server if you ever need to. Your computer or router is the first available route. Go to the Start button in the lower left corner, type Command Prompt, followed by ipconfig/all, and then press Enter if you’re using Windows 8.1 or 10. Following that, you’ll see a ton of details about your computer, including a list of DNS servers. Instead, click on System Preferences and Network if you’re using a MAC. Choose the particular network connection you want to examine, then click Advanced before switching to the DNS tab. Your servers will be listed here.
