How DNS Works: A Records, AAAAs, CNAMEs, and NS — Explained from First Principles
Type abhijitmohanty.com into a browser and hit enter. About 50 milliseconds later, a server somewhere responds with HTML. That jump — from a human-readable name to a machine-reachable address — is DNS. It happens billions of times a day and almost nobody thinks about it. This post breaks down exactly how it works: the lookup chain, the record types, and how all the distributed pieces fit together. The Problem DNS Solves Computers talk to each other using IP addresses — numbers like 192.0.2.1 or 2001:db8::1. Humans are bad at remembering numbers. DNS (Domain Name System) is the phone book that maps names to numbers. ...