How the Internet Works
“How the Internet Works” is the name of my new unit for the freshman classes. I’m just trying to give a general overview. Today I introduced IP addresses, domain names, and DNS. I designed an activity using nslookup to inspect DNS records of common domains and look up domain names from IPs. Then, students will use the numeric IPs to access web sites and see that the mapping between domain and IP is not always as direct as it seems.
The only problem is that when the students log in, the command prompt is disabled in Windows. I guess this is supposed to enhance security or something. Anyway, I had to scramble this morning to find a DNS/reverse-DNS lookup utility thats free, doesn’t require administrative privileges to install (and preferably doesn’t need to be installed), and can do both forward and reverse DNS lookups. So far, I haven’t succeeded. The best I could do was dnsquery.
Any suggestions? This is turning out to be a lesson in how Windows gets locked down, instead of how the internet works. Or maybe this actually is how the internet always works. I wasn’t trying to be ironic, I swear!