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External and Internal DNS: The 8 Steps in A DNS Lookup

External DNS manages public IP addresses and allows external users to access published services on the internet, while internal DNS is used for internal users for several reasons: private IP addresses are used internally instead of public IPs, internal services may not need to be publicly accessible, internal DNS can cache queries to reduce external requests, and it allows flexible management of internal domains. Internal DNS also answers recursive queries and caches results, unlike external DNS which is typically authoritative and does not cache.

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52 views

External and Internal DNS: The 8 Steps in A DNS Lookup

External DNS manages public IP addresses and allows external users to access published services on the internet, while internal DNS is used for internal users for several reasons: private IP addresses are used internally instead of public IPs, internal services may not need to be publicly accessible, internal DNS can cache queries to reduce external requests, and it allows flexible management of internal domains. Internal DNS also answers recursive queries and caches results, unlike external DNS which is typically authoritative and does not cache.

Uploaded by

Ria Fabz
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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External and Internal DNS

Usually, a company will have an external DNS to manage his own public IP, you mount a server to
allow external users to reach some services that you publish on internet (it can be a web server, or a
VPN gateway, etc.).
For internal users, you'll use an internal server for several reasons, among them :
 IP range used internally is not the one used externally. You use generally what we call
private IP adress range (because you can't have as many public IP as the number you would
need for your internals hosts). If you have a service that can be reachable for external users
and internals users, usually internal users will reach a service on the LAN, where external
users will reach the service through the WAN. Those two have differents adresses, for a
identical domain name. So if you rely only to an external DNS for your internal users, the trafic
will have to go on internet before coming back to the LAN because your users use an external
IP to reach the service.
 The is a variety of internal services that you don't want to publish externally (DNS record
are public, you may not want everyone to know what you are hosting internally). It it important
in term of security. Mapping a network an from external view using passive gathering is not
something you want.
 Internal DNS can be used to cache information. You'll reduce request sent externaly to
authoritative servers. DNS queries are very small, but come often.
 An internal DNS allow you to be very flexible in term of managing several internal
domains. Using an external DNS, you'll have some constraint that you don't have using them
internally.
 External DNS are usually authoritative, would not answer to recusrsive queries and do not
cache result. But it's very fast to answer queries. You may want to adresse the
recursive/cache part with a internal DNS

The 8 steps in a DNS lookup:

1. A user types ‘example.com’ into a web browser and the query travels into the Internet
and is received by a DNS recursive resolver.

2. The resolver then queries a DNS root nameserver (.).

3. The root server then responds to the resolver with the address of a Top Level Domain
(TLD) DNS server (such as .com or .net), which stores the information for its domains.
When searching for example.com, our request is pointed toward the .com TLD.

4. The resolver then makes a request to the .com TLD.

5. The TLD server then responds with the IP address of the domain’s nameserver,
example.com.

6. Lastly, the recursive resolver sends a query to the domain’s nameserver.

7. The IP address for example.com is then returned to the resolver from the nameserver.

8. The DNS resolver then responds to the web browser with the IP address of the domain
requested initially.
Once the 8 steps of the DNS lookup have returned the IP address for
example.com, the browser is able to make the request for the web page:

9. The browser makes a HTTP request to the IP address.

10. The server at that IP returns the webpage to be rendered in the browser (step 10).

What is recursive DNS?

A recursive DNS lookup is where one DNS server communicates with several other DNS


servers to hunt down an IP address and return it to the client.

Whenever a user types a domain name (such as ‘cloudflare.com’) into their browser window, this
triggers a DNS lookup. A series of remote computers known as DNS servers then find the IP
address for that domain and return it to the user’s computer so that they can access the correct
website.
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