I have a basic question about DNS infrastructure.
I'm wondering how the IP addresses of upstream DNS servers are configured within DNS servers. For example, when my router needs to satisfy a DNS query on behalf of a machine on my LAN, it asks its upstream DNS server that it was given through DHCP. However, how does the upstream DNS server know how to reach the root DNS server or some authoritative DNS server if it doesn't have that information cached? Is the root DNS server's IP address hardcoded anywhere to achieve this? Are backbone DNS servers always configured with some DNS server upstream from it?
I recall setting up a Microsoft DNS server in which any requests that couldn't be satisfied by it would be forwarded. However, since an upstream DNS server wasn't configured, it forwarded those requests right to the root. This behavior makes sense, however, how did it know where to contact the root?
Your reasoning is correct.
Q: How does the upstream DNS server know how to reach the root DNS server or some authoritative DNS server if it doesn't have that information cached? Is the root DNS server's IP address hardcoded anywhere to achieve this?
A: Small scale DNS server (for example DNS server serving clients in one organization) will sometimes have (manually) configured forwarders (usually ISP nameservers) in order to benefit from big cache of ISPs nameservers and faster queries. From my experience, with faster internet links (and with less latency) in recent years, this setup is used less often. Instead, root hints are used.
Q: Is the root DNS server's IP address hardcoded anywhere to achieve this?
A: Yes. For Microsoft DNS server it is located in systemroot\System32\dns\cache.dns, for BIND it is usually in /etc/bind/db.root or /var/named/named.root. An updated copy (if needed) can be retrieved from https://www.internic.net/domain/db.cache
Q: Are backbone DNS servers always configured with some DNS server upstream from it?
A: As far as I know, never.
A recursive server has the (or at least a) list of root servers provided out-of-band. This is often called "root hints" or something similar. Once it knows how to talk to the root servers, everything else follows from that. In practice, a recursor will quite quickly come to cache the name server addresses for the more common TLDs (like .COM and .ORG), so it doesn't always have to start at the root. But the root server addresses are manually provided to start things off.
Related
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 was quite eager to understand, how does DNS server work.
Scenario
If I do a DNS query, it reaches to local DNS server, now local DNS server checks locally, if information is not present, it queries for other DNS servers (in a hierarchical manner, root DNS, Top Level DNS, etc, so on).
Thoughts & Question
I wondered, does the local DNS server change the source ip of my request packet it received and if does change my source ip to its source ip for querying to other Dns servers, like NAT does (please correct me if I am thinking wrong), how does it keep track of me (like NAT does), like when the response comes from Root/TL/Secondary Dns server, how does it know that this response has to be directed to me.
Yes, the recursive (caching) name server issues the query itself, so the root, TLD, and authoritative servers all see the query source as being the recursive server.
If the recursive server supports EDNS0, the edns-client-subnet will pass through the /24 netblock of the client, allowing the authoritative server to see the first three octets of the client that initiated the request.
DNS responses are correlated with requests through examining the QUERY field of the response packet.
I have a website that I'm running locally at localhost:8000. I'd like to access my site from other devices on my network. I've tried to visit the site via my computer's internal IP address via: 127.0.0.1:8000but this doesn't work. Is this possible?
Three most probable things:
Check if there is a network route between the client and the server machine (commands like PING and TRACERT will help);
Check if the server machine has a firewall. If it does, there must be a rule allowing (opening) connections through that port (8000) in TCP;
Most likely, the problem is one of the two above. If not, there's one last thing:
Make sure the web server (the one that serves localhost:8000) is bound to listen to all IP addresses (not only 127.0.0.1).
To know that, search for servername bind all ip addresses on google. E.g., for apache HTTPD, it'd be apache bind all ip addresses.
here is what I do in similar cases:
search rejetto hfs on google, it is single executable less than 1Mb size and download it into your server machine.
after starting it, follow menu->IP addresses. these are all your possible addresess on the server side.
these are your IP addresses to enter, and your port is 8000 as you mentioned.
most possible IP addresses you will find are in the format of following:
192.168.?.?
10.0.0.?
169.254.?.?
besided you will probably need to add a firewall rule for your server app.
I have got a dedicated server that has nginx web server located in a uk datacenter, the ngnix acts as a front end server which then directs users to other instances that i have on aws located in america. What ip address would the client see, the ngnix front server(which is the desired result), or would the client still know about the instances or servers ip address located in america?
PS. nginx acts as a load balancer here.
Typically, users connect to "www.yoursite.com", and that gets looked up in DNS.
Assuming there is only one DNS entry (corresponding your nginx frontend), then as far as those users are concerned, they are only talking to that one machine.
Sometimes people use round-robin DNS, where multiple machines correspond to a given host name.
Presumably you would know if you were doing this, though (:
You can confirm this by tracing your traffic when connecting. Maybe use WireShark?
I have a requirement that I believe may be impossible and wanted to confirm this with experts in this community.
A client wants us to configure a DNS server to point all non-whitelisted domains to an IP address of a server on the internet. This server should forward / redirect all non-http traffic to an IP address associated with the real DNS record as accurately as possible. However, for all port 80 traffic, it should intercept the traffic and forward to a web proxy. This could in theory be possible if we had a large block of public IP addresses that could intelligently route based on the sender's IP to the proper destination, but the engineering effort required there to keep the DNS request and subsequent requests to that same domain in sync would be immense. Not to mention we would be limited from a concurrency perspective.This is probably similar to how OpenDNS does their DNS+Proxying, but they only seem to do it for google.com. This needs to work for an arbitrary set of domains (potentially all of them).
Is the above approach feasible? If not, are there other ways this problem can be approached short of requiring specialized gateway hardware?
Ideally the system will minimize bandwidth usage & latency for non-http traffic without requiring anything besides DNS or firewall configuration. I realize we can forward all http traffic at the firewall level, but the client wants to avoid http requests to CDNs or media heavy sites as well as minimize deployment effort across disparate network configurations.
OpenDNS works by blacklisting instead of whitelisting
When a host is blacklisted, openDNS will resolve the name into their IP address, which in turn prevent the client from accessing the real IP.
In your case, looks like you need transparent proxy where you can route all HTTP traffic to your proxy server:
See :
http://www.howtoforge.com/dansguardian-content-filtering-with-transparent-proxy-on-ubuntu-9.10-karmic
This might not be exactly what you are looking for but take a look at my article "How To Setup A Transparent Content Filtering Proxy" in which I utilize OpenDNS's blacklisting capabilities.
You can do it using two pieces:
DNS resolver configured with *. pointing to IP A.B.C.D (wildcard)
NGINX reverse proxy listening on A.B.C.D that proxy request to the domain present in the Host header.