Posts Tagged ‘internet’
What is DNS and which Server do I choose?
Some have heard about DNS and perhaps once configured in a router without knowing what it is or how it works. Others might know it, but haven’t considered to use another DNS server than the one of their ISP. This is what I will go through in this blog post.
DNS simply stands for Domain Name System, which is a hierarchy of Name Servers that have the intent to translate host names into IP addresses on a global scale. A name server hosts and/or caches these translations. In the case where they are at least hosted, the name server is often called a “DNS Server”. If you gave the host name superuser.com
to a DNS server, it would give you an IP back. In our case, that would be something like 64.34.119.12
.
Windows 7 Network Awareness: How Windows knows it has an internet connection
Have you ever been connecting to a new wireless network and seen the following pop-up balloon?
Whenever I connect to a WiFi network which requires in-browser authentication, such as university networks and hotel access points, Windows somehow magically knows. Windows also knows when your internet connection isn’t working, and can differentiate between having local LAN access, no network access at all, or full internet access. But how?
This week’s question of the week is one I myself asked about this very topic. I guessed that there must be some online Microsoft site that Windows is checking to determine the state of the connection, but I wanted proof, not just speculation.