Domain Name System

DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM

The domain name, or network name, is a unique name followed by a standard Internet suffixes such as .com, .org, .mil, .net, etc. You can pretty much name your LAN anything if it has a simple dial-up connection and your LAN is not a server providing some type of service to other hosts directly. In addition, our sample network is considered private since it uses IP addresses in the range of 192.168.1.x. Most importantly, the domain name of choice should not be accessible from the Internet if the above constraints are strictly enforced. Lastly, to obtain an "official" domain name you could register through InterNIC, Network Solutions or Register.com. See the Resources section later in this article for the Web sites with detailed instructions for obtaining official domain names.

Hostnames

·        Another important step in setting up a LAN is assigning a unique hostname to each computer in the LAN. A hostname is simply a unique name that can be made up and is used to identify a unique computer in the LAN. Also, the name should not contain any blank spaces or punctuation. For example, the following are valid hostnames that could be assigned to each computer in a LAN consisting of 5 hosts: hostname 1 - Morpheus; hostname 2 - Trinity; hostname 3 - Tank; hostname 4 - Oracle; and hostname 5 - Dozer. Each of these hostnames conforms to the requirement that no blank spaces or punctuation marks are present. Use short hostnames to eliminate excessive typing, and choose a name that is easy to remember.

·        Every host in the LAN will have the same network address, broadcast address, subnet mask, and domain name because those addresses identify the network in its entirety. Each computer in the LAN will have a hostname and IP address that uniquely identifies that particular host. The network address is 192.168.1.0, and the broadcast address is 192.168.1.128. Therefore, each host in the LAN must have an IP address between 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.127.