Can the Internet work without DNS?

Question

If we have an IP-based system of identifying nodes on the Internet why is there a need for DNS?

Answer 1

Because www.google.com is a lot easier to remember than 64.233.169.147?

It also adds transparency to a services location. You can move both geographically and between IP blocks and the rest of the world doesn't have to be notified of that change to continue using your service.

Answer 2

Although everybody else suggests that DNS is not necessary for the internet to work, I disagree. DNS is not necessary for an IP based network to work but for the Internet as we know it today it is absolutely necessary!!

Answer 3

If I register a domain name with godaddy and don't like godaddy anymore I can go to another provider and keep my domain name.

The same thing isn't possible with IP addresses as IP addresses are alocated to specific companies and are nothing that you can take with you.

Answer 4

Theoretically, yes, DNS is an optional luxury. But going to http://www.stackoverflow.com/ is easer than going to http://69.59.196.211/stack-overflow

The subdirectory is what you'd get if you had shared hosting.

Answer 5

Not only does DNS map human-readable names to IP addresses, it also decouples the client from specific details of the network endpoint it wants to connect to.

That allows providers of services to implement high availability systems and change implementation details without impacting their clients.

Answer 6

Absolutely it could! But you'd have a huge list of entries in /etc/hosts.

Seriously, though. "the internet" (the system of machines which deliver content to a user) would continue to work fine. "the web" (the collection of easy to find information transported over "the internet") would quickly break down because nobody (except the true geeks) would remember the IP Address to get to Google.

Answer 7

Because I don't want to remember that Google is 74.125.45.100.

Answer 8

You only need DNS to translate a domain name (e.g. www.google.com) into an IP (74.125.45.100). If everything is IP based, then you don't need DNS.

Answer 9

With DNS, one IP address can serve websites for multiple domains. (At least if they are running HTTP/1.1.) Without DNS, every website would basically require a dedicated IP address, and those would run out pretty fast.

Answer 10

The difference between an IP and a DNS name is that the IP specifies the servers location, while the DNS name allows you to specify the service itself. The big win that you get by DNS isn't so much that an DNS name is easier to remember, but that you have an layer of abstraction between the service and its implementation. So the underlying implementation can change, the servers can move around without the user noticing it.

Could the Internet work without it? Not for long, as one of the first things to do would be to implement a DNS-like service to workaround all the trouble that a lack of DNS would produce. Without DNS hyperlinks to other webpages would for example break way to easily, so that the world wide web wouldn't be able to function properly.

In a sense DNS is a very basic form of a content addressesable network, in that you say what you want, but not how to get there. You say www.google.com, because you know google does search, but you don't know where on the earth the server is located you end up taking to in the end, all that is abstracted away from you thanks to DNS.

Answer 11

Same reason you can store names in your mobile phone to reference phone numbers :)

There's no requirement for it. Its pure luxury

Answer 12

How many people can remember 10 IP addresses? And moving to IPv6?

DNS Names on the other hand - Yahoo.com google.com microsoft.com etc.

Answer 13

Without any sort of DNS, Google could act as a 'sort of' DNS, letting people find websites (wheras today you'd go to xyz.com, in DNS-less world you'd go to 75.125.127.100 and google xyz, and it'd give you that way)

The internet would work. Is it an internet I want to be a part of? Hell no.

Answer 14

There are some cases where "The internet" does not need DNS - for example, if you're exclusively using protocols which don't require DNS (Most peer-to-peer file sharing programs, for example).

Also some private internets have no need for DNS (but most use www to some extent, which usually means they do have it anyway).

Answer 15

There may be some webservers that have multiple sites on them that share the same IP and port for traffic so that DNS is how the different sites are used.

Answer 16

Everyone here seems to be forgetting that without DNS, memorizing IP addresses isn't the only option. ARPANET didn't have DNS, and that's where the hosts file originated. From Wikipedia:

The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet, had no distributed host name database, such as the modern Domain Name System for retrieving a host's network node address by using the host's name. Each network node maintained its own map of the network nodes that it needed to know about and assigned them names that were memorable to the user. [...] The small size of the ARPANET made the use of hosts files practical [...] however, the maintenance of the hosts file became a larger burden on system administrators [... and] the centralized and monolithic nature of host files eventually necessitated the creation of the distributed Domain Name System.

Answer 17

Here is a good reason for keeping locators (IPs) and identifiers (domain names) separate: RFC 5887. If you merge two companies and need their networks to become one, you'd better hope their networks were configured using identifiers and not locators.