Friday, May 1, 2009

Mapping Out the Internet: DDNS

By James Gilbert Pynn

An IP address is an Internet Protocol address assigned to individual computers. As such, they are assigned by two naming conventions: the Ipv4 and the Ipv6 conventions. The former, thus looks something like this: 211.09.232.177 (for IPv4), while the latter looks like this: 2111:db6:1:2346:9:824:1:0. A DDNS server does one thing and does it well: it maps domain names to IP addresses. This, of course, begs the difference between IP addresses and domain names.

There is nothing as counter-intuitive as being invited to visit the 755.23.143.133 page. As any ubiquitous search on Google or Yahoo (or any search engine for that matter) will yield a list of webpages with readable names, like amazon.com or apple.com. This is the unseen work of the DDNS server, which translates the IP address into an alphabetic name. Imagine the mind-boggling waste of filtering websites by means of the IP address.

The beauty of a domain name, on the contrary, is that it is quite intuitive. But, this is not to say a domain name is the same thing as a URL. The hairs never stop being split when it comes to online conventions. The URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, is the web address, which includes the domain name. So, whereas example.com is the domain name, the actual URL may be something like www.example.com/main. A DDNS service, then, creates a veritable 1:1 ratio between an IP address and a domain name.

The DDNS service, then, acts as a binary translator, making those IP conventions correspond to words. This unseen mapping service makes modern ecommerce possible as it renders the Internet a much more user-friendly realm. As numeric values are by and large secondary for most people, the use of names and naming conventions as made the Internet as navigable as a table of contents or an index.

The benefits of a DDNS service are as apparent as they are unappreciated. In addition to the work a DDNS server does for domain names, it also correlates the IP representations of email addresses to the @soandso.com format. Again, if most people were asked to write someone at 276.40.125.977 there would little to no email use. A DDNS service routes electronic mails to the appropriate alphanumeric address.


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