Bummer! This is just a preview. You need to be signed in with a Treehouse account to view the entire video.

Preview

Start a free Basic trial
to watch this video

Sign up for Treehouse

Name Servers

1:57 with Jason Seifer

DNS name servers hold the information about a given domain. Name servers also provide answers to your DNS queries.

  • There are two kinds of DNS Name Servers: master and slave.
  • The master name server stores original copies of records.
  • Slave name servers get copies of the data and share load as well as improve availability.
  • Name servers answer questions to your DNS queries.
  • 0:00

    Now we're going to talk about name servers.

  • 0:02

    When we're talking about DNS resolution

  • 0:04

    name servers are the first hop after the root servers,

  • 0:08

    which we'll be talking about in the next video.

  • 0:11

    When you request information about a certain .com

  • 0:14

    you're getting that information from something called the authoritative name server.

  • 0:19

    The name server provides answers to all of your DNS queries

  • 0:24

    such as what subdomains and domains match up to different IP addresses.

  • 0:29

    There are 2 different kinds of name servers:

  • 0:32

    Master and Slave.

  • 0:34

    The master name server stores the original copies of records.

  • 0:39

    The slave name server gets copies of the records

  • 0:42

    and is used to share the load and improve availability.

  • 0:46

    As you can see here we're doing a quick look up of the name servers of a domain.

  • 0:52

    We're using the host command and checking it out

  • 0:55

    with teamtreehouse.com.

  • 0:57

    ns after -t tells the host command that we want to know the name servers.

  • 1:04

    And then you can see the different name server output.

  • 1:07

    You'll notice that there are 4 different name servers.

  • 1:10

    What that means is that 4 different possible name servers

  • 1:14

    will return the information when we're looking it up for teamtreehouse.com.

  • 1:18

    These name servers are located in different parts of the world.

  • 1:23

    When the request is fired out to find out what part of www.teamtreehouse.com

  • 1:29

    the IP corresponds to, your computer gets back the very first result.

  • 1:33

    And it does that by finding it from the quickest server to respond.

  • 1:38

    You can also use the who is command to look up name servers

  • 1:42

    as well as information about a domain

  • 1:45

    such as the registrant or owner of the domain.

  • 1:48

    Different name servers are also very useful for load balancing

  • 1:53

    with slaves and caching the information that they return.

You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.

Sign up