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The computer must use DNS to find out the IP address of the web page.Īfter the computer has created the DNS query it will put the query inside an IP packet and send the packet to a DNS server. You have just instructed the computer to browse to a web page in a web browser. So the computer will easily find out what the IP address of the web server is, meaning that the destination IP address is known to the computer in one way or another.īut let’s go back to that DNS message.
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The computer would then use DNS to do a name resolution lookup to obtain the IP address of that web page. For example, if you are browsing to a web page on the Internet, you would enter an address in the browser. Most commonly a computer knows what IP address that it is sending the traffic to. It is used to associate MAC addresses with IP addresses and is a way for a computer to look up an unknown MAC address for a device that it wants to communicate with. There is another protocol called ARP which stands for Address Resolution Protocol.
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How do the MAC and IP addresses interact? What hasn’t been discussed however is the glue that binds those together. We have gone through how MAC addresses and Switching work, and other sections discuss the functionality of IP addresses and Routing.
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