find out what's really going on in here.

1. Your computer gets the request to connect to www.xxxxx.com, but what is www.xxxxx.com ? Well it the alias of a computer (which has an ip) and has an httpd daemon running (on port 80).
2. Your computers checks if that site isn't running on your own computer or on you local network. So it checks your /etc/hosts file (which has you local intranet information) or it checks a local nameserver (but because you're reading this I guess you don't have a nameserver installed (yet) so that won't be the case). By the way, this is a good chance to mention that DNS stands for Domain Name server.
3. In fact your computer doesn't check if www.xxxxx.com is on your local network, it checks if it can find the ip of www.xxxxx.com on you local intranet. (You 'might' have heard once that the entire internet is tcp/ip based :P)
4. Then your computer checks the file /etc/resolv.conf file should look like this.

   
   nameserver 123.123.123.123

5. This is the nameserver of you ISP. And when nothing can be found on the local intranet you computer will query this nameserver. (if this nameserver is
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