• Our mission

• What is DNS?

• History

• Structure

• Statistics

Contact

• Address DNS
• Staff DNS

What is DNS?

Any computer or other machine connected to the Internet is allocated an identifying number (the IP address). An IP address consists of 4 numbers between 0 and 255, separated by a full stop. Example: 195.22.138.102.
Routers, which are computers that manage the electronic traffic, make use of this number to find a path to that machine. An IP address can be permanent or temporary. Some computers that are continuously connected to the Internet are allocated a permanent IP address, while others that are connected occasionally are allocated a similar address on a temporary basis. So when a home user connects via his PC, or when he dials up to his provider, that user is allocated a temporary IP address for the time that the machine is online.

You can communicate with another computer by using that address. So you can reach the DNS website by typing the IP address shown above into the "address" field of your browser. In practice, it is very impractical to keep such addresses up to date. This led to the introduction of domain names. Domain names essentially do nothing more than provide a name that is easy to remember, which can be converted into an IP address that routers can use. The conversion information is stored in a hierarchy of "name servers" which are continuously connected to the Internet. The responsibility for the "first level", i.e. the names before the .be, lies with DNS Belgium.

When an end-user types in the address of a website (e.g. www.brusselsairport.be), then a whole series of things happen.

1. the end user's PC will ask the name server of his provider (the IP address for this is configured in your computer, or is sent to your computer) which IP address corresponds to this address. The provider maintains a list of addresses that have been retrieved in the past in a "caching name server". If this address does not appear there, the next step is carried out.
2. Since this concerns a .be extension (exactly the same happens in the case of a .com or other extension), the provider's name server will pass on the request from its customer (automatically) to the name server of the organization responsible for the .be domain, i.e. DNS Belgium.
3. The name server of DNS Belgium receives the request and passes on the IP address of the name server that belongs with the domain "brusselsairport". In other words, DNS does not know the address of the website, but does know all the addresses of the name servers that hold information about all ".be" domain names.
4. This address is sent back to the end user's provider, which then uses this address to query the name server that manages the "brusselsairport" domain.
5. That name server will then send back the IP address that corresponds to www.brusselsairport.be (the third level contains the "www" indicator: 212.35.104.67. 6. As the final step in this conversion process, the IP address found will be sent to the end user.
6. The user can now use this address to set up a connection with the computer on which the website www.brusselsairport.be is located.

The management of the first level name servers (all names before the ".be") is the task of the registry. In Belgium, this task is delegated to DNS BE. This includes the registration of domain names and keeping the name servers continuously operational.