Target Skills:

Ability to describe how clients and servers connect to each other, using DNS Lookups and TCP/IP Connections.

 
 
 
 
 
     

Making the Connection

Before the clients and servers can interact with each other, they need to first find each other on the network, then establish communication links.  They do this through processes called "DNS Lookups" and "TCP/IP Connections".
 

DNS Lookup

DNS stands for Domain Name Service, and it is a network service that translates names into specific network addresses called IP addresses.  This process of translating is called a "lookup".  If a client knows it needs to connect to "server.com", it does a DNS lookup of "server.com", which returns its IP address.  The client can now find the server on the network and attempt to connect to it using TCP/IP.  

TCP/IP Connection

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, and is the basic protocol for communicating between network IP addresses.  Once a TCP/IP connection is established, servers and clients can then communicate with each other using other protocols over TCP/IP.  Clients and servers access DNS through a TCP/IP connection using a fixed IP address for the DNS server.
     

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