DNS questions

For a while, I thought I had the basics of the way the DNS system works down pretty pat. I've read a few things tonight that have somewhat... confused me.

Here's what I thought was basically how it worked...

You've got a lot of DNS severs out there. Heck, most routers and modems today have DNS capabilities in some form or another. For those DNS servers to be able to get their information, though, they have to go to another DNS server that already has it. Sometimes, they have to go through several DNS servers before they find one that has the information it's looking for.

There is somewhat of a hierarchy of DNS servers... Correct? What I would call "top level" domain servers(registrars are the ones in which a new domain name would be added, or something to that effect, correct? Once that new domain name is added and an IP attached to it, you now have a DNS server that knows the ip of the server hosting the site associated with that domain name. Of course, no other DNS server will, but that's ok, because it will eventually go to that server and get it, right?

So... How does one DNS server know another DNS server's ip so that it can quarry it if it doesn't "know" something? Are these ip's manually configured in the dns server?

Another question. Is there any way to figure out the my ISP's dns server ip? I figured something like a routetr would reveal the ip of the dns server if I had never been to the site before and the resolution wasn't stored in my computer, router, or modem. Apparently, not the case. So, while my "dns server" under ipconfig shows as my modem, obviously, my modem doesn't come pre-packed with the ip address and associated domain name of every website on the web. And even if it did, many sites ips change every day and new ones are created every day, so how does my modem go about getting that information? It has to ask a higher-level dns server, does it not? How does it know what that server is?

The reason these question come to mind actually stemmed from my reading of an article on setting up a web server in which it implied that to have a web server you will also need a dns server to handle dns requests. If that is true, then everything I thought about dns must not be true. You wouldn't need your own dns server for your server... you would just need to buy a domain name and submit the servers ip address to a top level dns server, and everything would work from there, because every other dns server would eventually make it to that one and pick up the new domain name and ip address. Someone correct me where I'm getting mixed up.

 

I went back to howstuffworks.com and read up on their article about domain name servers and I think I got it mostly straightened out, but if anyone wants to comment that would be great. Thanks.

 

Sorry to post again but I can't edit a post after 10 minutes. Why do none of the dns servers listed here(http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dns2.htm) work for me? Are they not actually dns servers?

 

More information for you.
http://www.isoc.org/briefings/019/

 

Here is also a great place for DNS information.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/