Domain concept?

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:08:49 -0300
Sdävtaker <sdavtaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

	It sounds like you need a high level overview of what it's all
about - so here goes:

Domains aka Domain Names

	The internet Domain Name Service (DNS) provides a globally
available hierarchy of names, at the top level are things like com, org,
net, uk, ie, de, the names are (usually) written with the levels separated
by dots and the top level to the right - eg www.freebsd.org. Any entry in
this hierarchy of names is a "domain name" or domain for short. These names
can be used for many purposes (mail relays, hierarchy containers (eg com,
co.uk), aliases and even hostnames).

Hostnames

	These are really network endpoint names, but for the most part they
can be thought of as machine names - this only falls down when the machine
has multiple network interfaces with different names assigned. The use of
names for network endpoints is older than the DNS (originally the hosts
file was the only lookup mechanism). These days hostnames are usually
stored in the DNS and so a hostname is usually a domain name that refers to
a network endpoint. They don't have to be - you can still put hostnames in
the hosts file that have nothing to do with the DNS, but it makes life
easier to use the DNS.

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