What is term for parked an IP address? - dns

I had a website at http://berkelilingkesemua.info/ and I also had a specifically IP address for visitors like this http://74.82.164.10/ and what is term for that ?.
How could I make an IP address can be accessed by visitors like domain name ?. I got information from my server administrator. He told to me, I have to parked my an IP address such as parked a domain name. But I do not know, what is term for that ?.
Indonesia country has blocked many websites such as vimeo.com and other website. Not only that, in my country also blocks "Public DNS" such as Google Public DNS like this https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/ and you definitely know it.
My country is very extreme for blocks a website. You definitely know about my country had very extreme laws or very extreme constitutions such as censor or blur on local TV, porn laws, etc. Almost the same like ISIS laws or other terrorist laws. Maybe parliament in my country has controlled by terrorist or for corruption with many reasons like blocks a website. You definitely know that.
Therefore, many websites use a specifically IP address for visitors to avoid censor. So, visitors do not need PPTP VPN, other VPN or Proxy to unblock a website. They can be directly to a website which is blocked without domain name. But I do not know, what is term for that ?.
Do you know term for that ?.

Colloquially, "numeric IP address".
More technically, "IP address" is always numeric; format like 74.82.164.10 is "dotted decimal IPv4 address", as opposed to, say, hexadecimal IPv6 addresses, or pure decimal, where 74.82.164.10 is equivalent to 1246929930 (here, try it: http://1246929930/).
berkelilingkesemua.info is technically not an IP address, as it cannot be used directly in Internet Protocol (IP), but has to be first resolved to a real (numeric) IP address. It is a "fully qualified domain name", or FQDN.
"Parking an IP address" does not make sense to me. "Parking a domain name" is the practice of pointing a domain name to a temporary IP address while you don't have a real server to point it to yet, in order to keep the domain name registered to you while you don't have a real server to point it to. I am not sure how it is related to the other part of your question.

Related

Is domain required?

Is domain necessary for a website? Can't we see websites using the public ip address of the machine-like 65.2.10.98? I am unable to get a free domain name. I have tried freenom but it always shows domain not available. If it's necessary to have a domain please tell me a website from where I can get just a domain name for free because I have a Linux server up and running in AWS
Yes. You can use a public IP address for your website.
Domain names are solely meant for us humans to better find what we are looking for in the world wide web.
example.com is easier than 93.184.216.34.
But it is not a requirement to have a domain.
Although, I want to point out that IP addresses, especially IPv4 addresses are not as static as you think. You did not provide any details, but if you are not willing to pay for a domain I guess you are using the free tier EC2 instances. If you reboot/terminate such an instance, the IPv4 is likely to change. So your website is not available under the old IPv4 address anymore. Domains solve this problem because you can just point the domain to the new IPv4 address.
Since you are using AWS, and seems to not mind any form of domain name, try CloudFront. It will give you a default domain name like so:
http://d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net/
You can configure your EC2 as the origin for the CloudFront distribution. It has added benefits of DDoS and CDN too.
It is not required to have a domain.
When it comes to freenom i have only use for small projects, you can get a free domain as long you renew it every 12 months and if dont mind the ".tk"

What is the use of having canonical names in computer networks? Can't we just use alias names to get IP address directly?

For eg. we wanted to search google.com (let us think that its an alias name), then we will lookup in DNS and get its canonical name which further helps to get the IP address. Why cant we just get IP address from alias name as it would also be unique.
It is not always guaranteed that alias name resolves to same IP address. And, there is a very good reason for it. Lets say person A is browsing google.com from country A. Google has it servers all over the world (for efficiency purposes). It is beneficial if person A requests are directed towards google servers in country A than towards some other distant location. Here where CNAME records comes into the picture. CNAME records are configured in such a way that google.com resolves to servers which are specific to country A. And another case where you get different IP for same alias name is when you fetch MX records (mail server records), for the same domain you can have different servers managing mails and web traffic.
The design of URL is for convenience. The convenience is that when we want to change the server IP, we don't need to tell all the users the new ip of the website. In other words, what we have done in server will make no change to users. That is the core thought in server design.

Can I setup nameservers to point to other nameservers?

We are whitelabeling some website software, but in order to use it, our clients must point their domains to the software's nameservers. We'll say ns1.softwareco.com and ns2.softwareco.com.
Since we're whitelabeling, I don't want our clients to see Software Co's name in the name servers.
I could easily mirror Software Co's DNS settings, but if Software Co updates them in the future, my settings would be incorrect.
Is it possible to just point my nameservers ns1.whitelabelco.com and ns2.whitelabelco.com to Software Co's nameservers?
Your best way of achieving this is to follow the lead of other companies.
For example, if you look at how github allows the configuring of custom domain names for their pages product. Which is whitelabelling in effect.
The two options you have are basically, that you have a static IP address that will last for the lifetime of your service. Which would mean you would need to buy that address, complete with a contract to ensure it didn't need to be changed. You could place that address infront of load balancers etc, so it could be directed to multiple servers at the backend (even multiple locations)
The simpler option is to offer a CNAME redirection to your clients.
You tell your clients that you have service.example.com and they should point their servers to that with a CNAME record. so their clients will see www.domain.com but that will be redirected to your site.
The downside of a CNAME record over an IP Address, is that the end user can see that it is a whitelabel product. The problem is that DNS is an open system, and no matter what you do with it the end user will be able to see what you've done and find out that you are hosting that site.
The only way around that is to use an IP Address.

DNS delivering ads?

Could it be that my DNS (which was set by my ISP) is making money when I go online?
I know that the 'web-page unavailable, but look at these amazing ads'-pages (when the user tries to reach the wrong address) bring them a little bit of money. But I am interested in another case.
Could it be that they serve me an ad (as pop-up or pop-down) when I go to a completely 'normal' page without consent of the web-page itself? It would be a kind of add-on, you ask for page example.com/foe, the example.com site serves the page foe, but the DNS sends you unrequested a pop-under ad.
Am I paranoid, or is it happening? Note: I know how to block ads, pop-ups/under and so on. I just want to investigate better how DNS services are trying to make a buck (or a cent) here and there.
Not exactly. The way DNS works is straight forward; say you host a web server which you have purchased a domain name of noads.com for. When you purchase that domain name you're going to be setting it to point to the IP address of your server. Now, from your servers you can host ads if you wish, or setup redirects so that when someone requests, "Noads.com/hi" they get an ad proclaiming the wonders of a cereal high in fiber. However, at this point you're past the point of DBS resolution. The request to noads.com was resolved to your IP address. The /hi folder was accessed after that resolution took place and your webserver may have presented the ad or redirected as the programmer of the website chose.
As for your ISP sneaking something in there... It would be very bad for their business, if not a suable offense, to add A records to their DNS server which direct you to an IP other than the one registered. To check that you could use www.checkdomain.com to find what the domain should be, and type in the name of the domain you want to reach. Then use a command line (press your windows key and R to bring up a run prompt, then type CMD and press enter) from there type nslookup . This will show you the IP you SHOULD be directed to and the IP you ARE being directed to.
One last parting thought, DNS is not a random function. Meaning you can't set an "If, then" on it. If you request a website it's always going to go to the same IP. The only reason it wouldn't is if there are multiple host records pointing to different IPs for a single name. I don't believe that is something to worry about, as the ISP servers will point to the official "internet" servers which will be carefully tended and kept free of error.
Hopefully this explains everything to your satisfaction. Please feel free to ask for clarification if something is not clear.
Thanks!

Dynamically add subdomains?

I was wondering if it's possible to dynamically add subdomains that point to dynamic IP addresses, and how I would go about doing that? In other words, "how is dyndns/no-ip implemented" :-)? (The part I don't get is adding/changing the DNS entries... I understand how the client sends a packet every few minutes -___-). I can tell all my users to just use DynDNS/No-IP, of course, but having it integrated with the application would be much cooler.
Thanks,
Robert
To be able to directly update/control where a domain/subdomain resolves to, you must have your own name server. When you register a domain under a TLD (for example, .com), that TLD has a nameserver. Anytime a client needs to look up the IP to something.com, they ask the .com nameserver where to find the nameserver for something. That nameserver in turn returns data about the domain or subdomain.
When you register a domain at a place like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, and you use their online tools to point your various subdomains to IP addresses, you are creating entries on their nameserver. When a client requests your domain, the root nameserver tells them to check with GoDaddy's nameserver. If you look through the configuration options of your registrar, you'll generally find a place to specify your own nameserver instead of entering domain IPs. Setting that will tell the chain of nameservers to defer resolution of your subdomains to that nameserver. Obviously at that point, having direct control over the mechanism of name-address resolution, you can do whatever you like.
Here's one list of open-source name servers. There are many others, ranging from free OSS to custom, proprietary and very expensive. Technically you could also write your own, as BIND is a public, standard format.
As you've partially said, the way DynDNS and other dynamic IP services work is that they update their server's DNS records based on a heartbeat from a client every few minutes.
The trick is that they use extremely short TTL times so that caches for the record expire very quickly and need to re-query the DynDNS server (which makes dynamic IP changes propagate quickly).
If you wanted to implement this, either find a DNS host that offers an API, or programatically update the DNS on your own server with a short TTL.

Resources