title: What's the anatomy of a DNS session?
body: <p>I'm working on a homework assignment that basically asks us to parse a DNS response to get the IP address and such. The problem is the professor has told us in great detail what the response looks like from the DNS server, but I don't know what to send the server. My first attempt was to <code>netcat &lt;ip address of local name server&gt; 53</code> and just type in www.google.com and hit enter and look for a response but I didn't get anything back.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone describe to me what a DNS query looks like (like how many bytes are allowed for each part of the query)?</p>