Question

• What role does an IP address and a domain name play on a network? 

• What are the advantages of using private IP addresses as opposed to public ones? 

• How do IP addresses and the DNS work together to enable network communication?

Answer 1

Ques 1. What role do an IP address and a domain name play on the network?

Ans 1. IP is a short name of Internet Protocol.
Roles of an IP address on a network are as follows
1) An Internet Protocol address as the name suggests is an address given to every machine on a network to identify its location. Just like we have our home address to locate our position, similar to that every machine in a network has got its IP address.
2) Apart from giving the location of a machine, the IP address also serves as an interface identification for a network.
3) An IP address is unique for each machine in a network, so it helps to easily send and receive information over the network.
4) Currently, we have two types of IP address
a) IPv4 (version 4): It consists of 32-bit number
b) IPv6 (version 6): It consists of a 128-bit number

Role of Domain Name
Domain Names are actually the names given to a collection of an individual IP address or a group of IP addresses.
For internet users like us, it is not easy to remember all the numerical IP address. So if one has to visit a particular website then the person has to remember its IP address but it is not possible to remember exactly the IP address of all. In order to solve this problem the concept of a domain name was introduced which represents certain groups of IP addresses.
Remembering the name is much easier than remembering the IP address. The conversion of this IP address to the domain name and vice versa is done by a system known as Domain Name System or DNS.
DNS is actually a collection of IP address and domain names which helps to convert the IP address to the domain name and vice versa very quickly

Ques 2. What are the advantages of using private IP addresses as opposed to public ones?

Ans 2. There are both advantages and disadvantages of using private IP address over public IP address
Let us first discuss the advantages.
1) The main advantage of using private IP address is security and privacy.
2) Using a private IP address means your devices are confined only to a small network of yours where only the authorized devices can connect and access information. It provides lots of security and privacy as outsiders cannot enter your network and access your devices. So it won't allow either to attack your devices or get access to your valuable information and data.

Apart from advantages, we also have some disadvantages for using private IP address over the public IP address and those are as follows.
1) Maintenance cost is large for private networks
2) No access to outside networks or the internet. This sometimes leads to a problem in transferring data and information from other networks or the internet.

Ques 3. How do IP address and the DNS work together to enable network communication?

Ans 3. Domain Name System is actually like a telephone directory where all the IP address are stored. Whenever a user wants to visit a website, DNS will look into the website name then it will search the website name in the DNS server and return the appropriate IP address.
This process of converting a web address to the IP address involves some steps which we will discuss.
The steps involved are as follows

• An internet user enters some web address as which has domain "com" into a web browser. Then the query goes through the Internet and is received by a DNS recursive resolver.
• The resolver will then query a DNS root nameserver (.).
• DNS root server will respond to the resolver with the address of a Top-Level Domain (TLD) DNS server (e.g .com or .org), which stores the information for its domains. While searching for the entered website, the request will be directed toward the .com TLD.
• Resolver will make a request to the .com TLD.
• The TLD server will respond with the IP address of the entered website.
• Finally, the recursive resolver will send a query to the domain’s nameserver.
• The IP address of the entered website will be returned to the resolver from the nameserver.
• The DNS resolver will then respond to the web browser with the IP address of the domain requested at the start.