By Stephen Bucaro

Have you ever wondered what happens when you enter, or click on, a web address in your browser? How does your computer connect to Web site you requested? Part of what makes that happen is Internet's Domain Name Service (DNS).

Similar to how every telephone has a unique number, every Web site, or "domain" on Internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses are 32 bit numbers represented by four bytes separated by dots. Each byte can represent a number from 0 to 255, therefore highest IP address 255.255.255.255.

People have difficulty remembering 12 digit numbers, so web sites are are identified by names like www.sitename.com instead of their IP address. DNS is a database of domain names and their corresponding IP addresses.

In beginning, every computer on Internet had a list of all domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. But that quickly became unwieldy. Now domain name database and domain name to IP address translation is performed by computers assigned as DNS servers.

By Stephen Bucaro

Some time ago I purchased a motherboard, CPU, and memory from a local computer store. The sales person did me "favor" of plugging CPU and memory into motherboard. I held my breath as this was done with no care whatsoever taken to prevent damage from a possible electrostatic discharge.

A static discharge can damage or destroy integrated circuit electronics. The problem is that you may not see a visible spark. You may not know that a static discharge occurred. And, you are lucky if static discharge totally destroyed circuit.

Often a component is only damaged and appears to work. This type of damage can produce occasional or frequent errors. This is what technicians call "flaky" because failure does not occur reliably enough to be able to track it down.