All too often we take this protocol for granted.

Sure signposts in a field works just fine – but it pays to understand a little more about what is going on here.

A colleague (Alex) saw this on Imgur (alas without credit… and now without all the comments) – and it seemed far, FAR too good not to share.

Be gone smoke and mirrors – here we have a 101 on DNS.

Worthy of note you will often hear us talk about propagation delay – this is the bit where the DNS server says “Okay, I will save that for a while”. It stamps it with a Best Before Date (which is dictated by the TTL – Time To Live – on that record), and will continue to use that record until that point is reached – at which point it will fetch another.

Thank you unnamed artist!

Caveat: Yes, yes, I know – it does miss out the root servers bit, but shhh.