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Joy of Medina County Magazine | December 2021
BUSINESS: FROM A TECHNICAL MIND
Understanding Data’s Path by Tyler Hatfield When visiting a website, you probably do not consider how your phone or computer finds that information. While all we see is data appearing in front of us, all of that information had to travel thousands of miles and through dozens of devices and systems to reach us. When you enter a URL into a web browser, your device first has to find where that points to since special computers, called servers, host the data you need. Servers have an address similar to a house address, so your device needs to find it. Your device will send the request out to your internet service provider (ISP) first. Once there, it is sent off to a set of special servers designed to store and remember where every website points to or to remember another server that will know. These special computers, called Domain Name Servers (DNS server), use the name of the website you are trying to find to look up the server's address that holds the data for it. These addresses are called internet protocol addresses (IP addresses). Every device connected to the internet has an IP address, though your home network has one main IP address for your house that your devices share. While this may sound complicated, an easy way to think about this process is to compare it to the postal system. First, you send a request (your piece of mail) for Example.net to your post office (your ISP). The post office then sends your mail to a sorting center, in this case, a DNS server.
The sorting center then looks up the address of Example.net and sends your mail to the nearest post office or sends it to another sorting center closer to the address. Once close enough, the sorting center sends the mail down to the local post office, the recipient's ISP, to be delivered to the end address where the website's server is located. After that request is received, assuming all goes to plan, the server ships a package full of the website's data back to you using the same process. In most cases, data travels faster than the blink of an eye over the internet. However, things can go wrong on every level, causing outages to homes or making websites suddenly go down and stop working. The most dangerous of these outages are DNS outages where the sorting system can no longer function. Without DNS servers, your requests are not able to reach other devices and vice versa. These types of outages are rare, but they do happen. We will explore how and why this affected Facebook.com in a recent outage in next month’s column. Tyler Hatfield has a passion for technology that he would like to someday turn into his own business. He runs a small media group, hatsmediagroup.com, and works on computers on the side. He can be contacted with questions and for recommendations at hatsmediagroup@gmail.com
