Automating DNS Checks With socket

A recent report from Georgia Tech and co-sponsored by Google indicates that the number of poisoned DNS servers is on the rise. As you may know, the Internet runs on a system of domain name servers (DNS) that convert the website URL (e.g., 'www.about.com') into a series of four numbers that is unique within the larger, world-wide network (e.g., '207.126.123.20'). Poisoning that system would, at the very least, restrict the number of sites that you could visit intentionally. In a worse case scenario, it could shut out large sections of the Internet and effectively invert "the computer is the network" into "the network is the computer". Through Python's socket module, however, you can check the DNS entry of a site by name and by IP address. Find out how.