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Digital Literacy How the Web Works The World Wide Web The Domain Name System

Just out of curiosity, is there any way to determine which/where the DNS was that I used to access a particular website?

*Just wondering if it's possible or important to know which DNS was accessed and where it's located.

2 Answers

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points

Depending on the OS, there would be some command to show the DNS servers configured to serve your requests. For example, on Windows, ipconfig /all will show detailed information for all network connections, including DNS Servers.

As the video explains, DNS lookups can cascade through several references before receiving a name resolution. If you want to know which DNS server provides the definitive resolutions for a particular domain, this process can be investigated further using the nslookup command. There are good online sources about how to use it if that's the level of detail you are interested in.

If you want to know physical locations, it would be extremely difficult to be certain, but you can possibly get a clue by using whois to look up information about the domain owner.

Luis Pozuelos
Luis Pozuelos
1,970 Points

if you want to know which route is used to access a page use the command traceroute or tracert depends of the OS, that comment shows you the full path route.