btw... for those of you who don't get how Network Solutions or
Godaddy type companies (registrars) can "shutdown" their customers'
sites, here is a basic overview of how web-site names and IP addresses
work:
The registrar is a company where you register a domain name as yours.
They keep a database where they map a domain name to a set of DNS
servers. DNS here stands for Domain Name Server. A DNS server does
a name translation from a web-site name to an IP address. IP address is
a unique number that is given to each computer on a network (or the
internet).
So, for example, when you want to visit Ron Paul's presidential web-site
you type into your browsers address/URL field "ronpaul2008.com". The
browser will need to translate that name to an IP address. To do this the
browser will need to find out the DNS servers responsible for ronpaul2008.com
site. To do this it performs a query on the TLDs (Top Level Domain) servers.
This query will return the DNS servers for "ronpaul2008.com"
Example: This is query for Name Server (ns) for ronpaul2008.com
Code:
host -t ns ronpaul2008.com
ronpaul2008.com name server ns1.p03.dynect.net.
ronpaul2008.com name server ns2.p03.dynect.net.
ronpaul2008.com name server ns3.p03.dynect.net.
ronpaul2008.com name server ns4.p03.dynect.net.
So the above servers ns1 through ns3.p03.dynect.net are responsible
for ronpaul2008.com domain name. Now you can ask any one of these
servers what IP does ronpaul2008.com reside in:
Code:
$ host ronpaul2008.com ns3.p03.dynect.net
Using domain server:
Name: ns3.p03.dynect.net
Address: 208.78.71.3#53
Aliases:
ronpaul2008.com has address 74.205.85.12
ronpaul2008.com mail is handled by 10 2008vaexc1.2008va-rpcamp.com.
So as you can see the IP address for ronpaul2008.com is 74.205.85.12.
Now your web-browser can access the Ron Paul Presidential web-page
and display the page to you.
So as you can see, the TLD has complete control over this "look-up"
process. So if Network Solutions was responsible for registering a
particular domain name, and they wanted to shut off any traffic to
that particular domain for whatever reason, all they would need to
do is remove from their database the entry for the domain's DNS
servers. After this, all queries for the domain's DNS servers would
return no value and so your web-browser wouldn't be able to proceed
to ask the DNS servers what the IP address is for the domain.
I hope this helps clarify things.
