What is DNS?
Domain Name System (DNS) is a database system that translates a computer's fully qualified domain name into an IP address.
Networked computers use IP addresses to locate and connect to each other, but IP addresses can be difficult for people to remember. For example, on the web, it's much easier to remember the domain name www.amazon.com than it is to remember its corresponding IP address (207.171.166.48). DNS allows you to connect to another networked computer or remote service by using its user-friendly domain name rather than its numerical IP address. Conversely, Reverse DNS (rDNS) translates an IP address into a domain name.
Each organization that maintains a computer network will have at least one server handling DNS queries. That server, called a name server, will hold a list of all the IP addresses within its network, plus a cache of IP addresses for recently accessed computers outside the network. Each computer on each network needs to know the location of only one name server. When your computer requests an IP address, one of three things happens, depending on whether or not the requested IP address is within your local network:
• If the requested IP address is registered locally (i.e., it's within your organization's network), you'll receive a response directly from one of the local name servers listed in your workstation configuration. In this case, there usually is little or no wait for a response.
• If the requested IP address is not registered locally (i.e., outside your organization's network), but someone within your organization has recently requested the same IP address, then the local name server will retrieve the IP address from its cache. Again, there should be little or no wait for a response.
• If the requested IP address is not registered locally, and you are the first person to request information about this system in a certain period of time (ranging from 12 hours to one week), then the local name server will perform a search on behalf of your workstation. This search may involve querying two or more other name servers at potentially very remote locations. These queries can take anywhere from a second or two up to a minute (depending on how well connected you are to the remote network and how many intermediate name servers must be contacted). Sometimes, due to the lightweight protocol used for DNS, you may not receive a response. In these cases, your workstation or client software may continue to repeat the query until a response is received, or you may receive an error message.
When you use an application such as telnet to connect to another computer, you most likely type in the domain name rather than the IP address of that computer. The telnet application takes the domain name and uses one of the above methods to retrieve its corresponding IP address from the name server. A good analogy is to think of DNS as an electronic telephone book for a computer network. If you know the name of the computer in question, the name server will look up its IP address.
Within most Internet applications, you will not see the IP address of the computer to which you're connecting. If you want to find the IP address of a particular computer, refer to the appropriate

Y'know a really annoying thing about Internet Explorer (possibly not 7.0+ though) almost always when there's a faulty internet connection or no connection at all and you try to load a page, IE attributes it to a DNS server error. Although, I suppose it is because it can't connect to a DNS server to translate the domain name in to an IP address. Still, very annoying if you're a newbie to the whole computer thing and are trying to figure out why you can't connect to the internet. [nostalgia}Ah, the long gone days of n00bdom...[/nostalgia].

Thanks for the info. Really appreciate it.
DNS is not an easy thing to be able to deal with, but soon i'll get the hang of it.

DNS can also be known as Domain Name Server though the process and so on, are the same. Well, afterall, you still copied and pasted it? You could prolly as well put in quotes and start giving your thoughts about it. No offence here.

Man, I remember trying to host myself off my own computer, using Apache and Dynamic DNS redirection to my IP Adress. That was a long, labor-intensive experiment, and sadly I never got it to work. (Oh well, now that I have Trap 17, I don't need to worry about that anymore).

yep

will i think that is because you have the tcp ip ver 6 enabald
try goning to
control panel > network connections>local area connection>properties
and uninstall it

O_o.

You know something scary about DNS admins do with this is actually use this as a last minute device so as to find out the internet provider of an unruly and almost unbanable user who keeps returning to one's forum. One of my best friends had to use this as a last resort against a young lady who wouldn't stop harrassing him about how he role plays on an rp forum so he finally used this information to track her internet provider down and complained to them via email, within 6 weeks later he heard no more harassing emails from the young lady again. I suppose this sorta thing is useful when in the right hands but publically displayed....I don't know it just seems *too* good a resource for those in the wrong hands. At least that's my take on this.