Domain concept?

[Matthew Dillon]

:Hello people, i hope you can enlaight me a little.
:I installed my DFBSD, configured it, instelled a lot of services 
:(apache22, sendmail, imap, dns, pop3, webmail, php4, php5, perl, some 
:CMSs, svn, etc...) after that i got a static /30 to make my own DNS real.
:In the time i did all this I got in front of 2 concepts "host" and 
:"domain" several times. I found a lot of resourses about how go around 
:the problems i found, but i could never really understand where is the 
:line between them, and what each of them means.
:Can u please point me to some place with a nice explanation? I am 
:googling it but only find some technical stuff about them and no the 
:concept involved.
:Thanks for any help
:Sdäv

    In almost all cases you set your machine's hostname to your fully
    qualified domain name.  So for example if your domain is 'mydomain.com'
    and you want to name your machine 'mymachine', then the fully qualified
    domain name for your machine would be 'mymachine.mydomain.com' and you
    would put this line in your /etc/rc.conf:

	hostname="mymachine.mydomain.com"

    Many BSD's have a utility called 'hostname' which can be used to
    set the hostname manually but usually you do it by specifying it in
    /etc/rc.conf and the boot sequence will set the name.

    Many BSD's also have a utility called 'domainname'.  This utility
    is only used for an obscure protocol called NIS and should not be
    used.  It can cause confusion, though.  Just don't use it.

    When you set up your DNS resolver you can specify shortcuts.  For
    example, all of my <blah>.dragonflybsd.org machines have an
    /etc/resolv.conf that specifies this line:

	search dragonflybsd.org

    You would have a line like this:

	search mydomain.com

    What this line does is allow you to shortcut the name you use to 
    access your machine.  That is, you can just go 'ping mymachine'
    instead of having to say 'ping mymachine.mydomain.com'.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>