I'm building a clone of the host command. I've tried finding the host of twitter.com and have received the same IP-Address both on my version and the real host command. The address is: 104.244.42.65.
For some reason, when I input this IP-Address into the browser, it says that there's no webpage with that IP address. Why is this happening?
The host command uses ICMP to detect if the DNS name of the host can be resolved and host is reachable. And you can resolve and reach the IP that resolved for twitter.com.
However, the web server of Twitter is probably configured to answer only if asked by DNS name and when your browser sends a HTTP GET request with the IP, the server does not respond.
Twitter gets tons of requests per minute. The surely use load-balancers that redirect "twitter.com" to multiple IP addresses and they don't want people to use particular IP addresses, which would mess up their load balancers.
I am trying to get the big picture although my primary domain is not networking.
Some question's narrowed down for which I'm not getting enough/proper answers online
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
A gateway IP refers to a device on a network which sends local
network traffic to other networks. it sits between you and internet,or other network . its like a watchman.
Question 1 : google.com has multiple ip addresses lets say then , Yes, that is possible, and will need to be two A records. This is called Round-Robin DNS. Clients will semi-randomly use one of the two addresses.
question2: yes port forwarding happens more often than we think. ALL VPC's (virtual private clouds like AWS , GCP , Azure etc) use this as they dont want to expose servers/internal resources to the internet.
depending on the port number , particular service is exposed to requesting client. lets say we want to make a website public , then we explicitly expose port 80(http) 443(https) so that web crawlers and users can see them.
Port forwarding, sometimes called port mapping, allows computers or
services in private networks to connect over the internet with other
public or private computers or services.
google https://www.google.com:444/ wont work because they did not expose port 444 on their cloud router
but https://www.google.com:443/ will work because the server corresponding to google.com has explicitly left it open.
How IP is resolved:
Step 1 - Send a Request to Resolve a Domain Name
When you type www.google.com into a browser, in order to load the webpage, your computer asks for the IP address. Computers do not know in advance where they can find the necessary information, so they try searching through the DNS cache and for available external source. proceed from lower level caches to root/main servers.
Step 2+3 - Try to resolve an IP Locally
Before going externally, your computer loads the local DNS cache database to see if you already requested the IP for that domain name. Every computer has a temporary cache with the most recent DNS requests and attempts to connect to online sources. if required record is present locally its called "CACHE HIT" and query stops.
However A computer’s local DNS cache database does not always contain the necessary data to resolve a domain name this is called a "CACHE MISS" . In that case, the request goes further to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and its DNS server.
Step 4 - ISPs Ask Outside DNS Servers to Provide an IP Address iff Cache miss
ISP DNS resolvers are configured to ask other DNS servers for correct IP address mapping until they can provide data back to the requester. These are iterative DNS queries.
When a DNS client sends such a request, the first responding server does not provide the needed IP address. Instead, it directs the request to another server that is lower in the DNS hierarchy, and that one to another until the IP address is fully resolved. There are a few stops in this process.
hierarchy looks like this (just for reference):
Root domain nameservers. Root servers themselves do not map IP addresses to domain names. Instead, they hold the information about all top-level domain (TLD) nameservers and point to their location. TLD is the rightmost section of a domain name... Root servers are critical since they are the first stop for all DNS lookup requests.
TLD nameservers. These servers contain the data for second-level domains, such as ‘phoenixnap’ in phoenixnap.com. Previously, the root server pointed to the location of the TLD server. Then, the TLD server needs to direct the request toward the server that contains the necessary data for the website we are trying to reach.
Authoritative nameserver. Authoritative servers are the final destination for DNS lookup requests. They provide the website’s IP address back to the recursive DNS servers. If the site has subdomains, the local DNS server will keep sending requests to the authoritative server until it finally resolves the IP address.
Step 5 - Receive the IP Address
Once the ISP’s recursive DNS server obtains the IP address by sending multiple iterative DNS queries, it finally returns it to your computer. The record for this request now stays cached on the hard drive. The browser can then fetch this IP from the cache and connect it to the website’s server.
ALL this happens in less than 1 second, most of the times. if you just registered a new domain it might take few hours to propagate this DNS cache globally hence newly registered websites do not show up sometimes.
About companies owning multiple IPs
Big companies have pool of IPs reserved for example 123.234.xxx.xxx which means a company has reserved 255*255 ips. they are mapped on a VPC(virtual private cloud)
and accessible vis a subnet masking and CIDR feature, like your EC2 instances on AWS
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
For sure it should, but it is mostly a Google management question that only they will be able to answer right. The thing is that we must understand how DNS query's work for this.
Let's take a look of it:
Device A requests the IP address through a DNS query of the device B.
To do this, it uses the network port 53 (Domain) on which it will ask, depending on which DNS server is being used at the time, which is usually the home router. Then the router will ask the ISP's DNS server, which will respond with a cached response, or the query with another server on top of it if it does not have one; All this process is followed until a reliable cache response is reached or until the authoritative response server is reached, that is, the name server that manages the domain in question.
Only the authoritative response server contains the reliable information of which IP of the domain which is going to be reached.
I suppose that within Google's servers and its network they use Google's own DNS servers, which are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 where the DNS records are obtained and consulted by caching from many sites.
In general terms Google's IP will change depending on where you are, I made a DIG query to Google's authoritative servers, however, I received a result based on location to improve the route and loading time of the site which was 142.250.73.238.
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
Yes, they do. To handle queries with load balancers or similar and even for caching dns requests.
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
This has multiple answers. By the way, they actually can do a secure DNS query.
if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right?
They don't have to, but if they want to they can.
"Is this a fair assumption?"
No, the IP's doesn't depend on a router, the router only routes to a computer/server which can have multiple IP's. By the other hand, each thing (computer, server, etc... must have an IP which can be also a WAN IP).
I'm a little confused about IP addresses.
I know that every web domain has an ip address.
Does the IP address represent the physical machine / host the website files are stored on?
Therefore when DNS lookup is performed, the domain's IP address is returned to the client. The client then uses this ip to contact the server that the web files reside on.
Is my understanding correct?
Many thanks
You are correct.
It is kind of like how some companies may say Dial PIZZAHUT instead of saying, Dial 74992488. PIZZAHUT is easier to remember, but you actually are dialling the number.
You're talking about HTTP protocol. Yes, FQDN (web domain) is resolved to IP address by DNS server. Client will connect to server IP address. Since you're probably using HTTP 1.1, HTTP request will contain also FQDN. This information is used by web server to perform several checks, like SSL certificate validation or Virtualhost management (several domains on a single IP address).
I am logging every user's IP when they access the company's page.
There are two ways to access the page from inside the local network:
http://company/webpage
and
https://webpage.company.com
What bugs me is that even when the users use the https global IP, their accesses are still recorded on database with their IP as 10.50.1.12 or 10.50.1.100.
Does that means that the browser or something else is redirecting the https://webpage.company.com to company/webpage? Or does that mean that I'm using a flawed method to log the users IP?
Another way to ask my question (just to make sure I'm being clear): if I'm accessing my Internet web page from inside the LAN network, am I effectively going outside my network and then back? If not, where am I going wrong with my logging?
Code used to log user's IP:
user.LastIP = HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress;
I'm curious about this because I want to make sure the users inside the company will access the page using exclusively the LAN Network. The goal is to save bandwidth usage, which is scarce.
Edit:
Pinging the https://webpage.company.com from inside the LAN network will result in a reply from a global IP address like 194.xxx.xxx.xxx. So I'm clearly getting the user's IP wrongly. What would be the ideal way of retrieving the IP from the page accessing entity?
Access to http://company/webpage will result in a DNS lookup of the host name "company". To resolve this, DNS will need a fully qualified domain name (fqdn), so it will add a top level domain (according to the configured search list in the client). In this example, it seems fair to assume that the fqdn will be "company.com". This, in turn, may very well resolve to the same IP address as the "webpage.company.com". You can check this by using dns lookup utilities like 'nslookup' and 'dig', or simply by using 'ping company' and 'ping webpage.company.com'.
The users IP addresses you mention, 10.50.1.12 and 10.50.1.100, seems to be the local IP addresses of the client hosts. I base this assumption on the fact that these IP addresses come from the RFC-1918 address range which is used for internal addresses. My guess is that these are the correct IP addresses, and that your logging works fine.
The users IP address you will log from accessing 'http://company/webpage' and 'https://webpage.company.com' should in most cases be the same. You can see it this way: it doesn't matter what the target URL is, traffic is still coming from the same host, the same IP address.
In any case, you most probably don't need to worry about any traffic leaving your local network.
Why is a website assigned the same ip address each time?
Discuss with a suitable example whether a server can be assigned two different IP addresses.
Would appreciate some help in these two questions.
Thanks
Question #1:
Short answer: websites are assigned the same IP address so that Web clients will send requests to the proper system.
Long answer: Web clients rarely connect to servers using IP addresses directly. Instead, clients use domain names like www.google.com. DNS software then maps the name to the address.
Thus changing a Web server address should be easy - just change the name mapping. But for performance reasons, name mappings are cached. So if the mapping is changed, some caches will have the old mapping for a period of time (called the Time To Live, or TTL). So changing a Web server address isn't trivial.
Question #2:
There are a number of circumstances where a server can have more than one IP address:
The server is hosting multiple VMs. Each VM has its own IP address.
The server is hosting websites for multiple companies. Each website has its own IP address.
The server is doing routing between two subnets. It will have separate IP addresses for each subnet it is on.