Experts are asking whether it’s time to shine a bright light on the “black art” of Domain Name System (DNS) management.”DNS is one of those topic areas that I’ve always called a black art,” said Robert Whiteley, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “It is very poorly understood, relative to how important it is.” DNS is essentially an immense, worldwide distributed database. DNS servers across the world help translate Internet domain names, which are comprehensible to humans, into the IP addresses that networks understand.When a user goes into a Web browser and types a Web address such as SearchNetworking.com, the browser asks the operating system to translate the name into an IP address. The operating system first looks at the host file, then it looks at the local cache. If it finds nothing there, it goes to a local DNS server. If that server doesn’t know, it moves on to local root servers and start of authority (SOA) servers.

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