In the above scenario, we referred to a "requester". What is the requester in this situation?
In almost all cases, the requester will be what we call a "resolving name server" A resolving name server is one configured to ask other servers questions. It is basically an intermediary for a user which caches previous query results to improve speed and knows the addresses of the root servers to be able to "resolve" requests made for things it doesn't already know about.
Basically, a user will usually have a few resolving name servers configured on their computer system. The resolving name servers are usually provided by an ISP or other organizations. For instance Google provides resolving DNS servers that you can query. These can be either configured in your computer automatically or manually.
When you type a URL in the address bar of your browser, your computer first looks to see if it can find out locally where the resource is located. It checks the "hosts" file on the computer and a few other locations. It then sends the request to the resolving name server and waits back to receive the IP address of the resource.
The resolving name server then checks its cache for the answer. If it doesn't find it, it goes through the steps outlined above.
Resolving name servers basically compress the requesting process for the end user. The clients simply have to know to ask the resolving name servers where a resource is located and be confident that they will investigate and return the final answer.
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