Prologue
Some years ago I started out creating my own Lan with just a
dialup connection and an Intranet Web server (Intranet stands for
Intra-Networking ie: internal networking. Most corporations use Intranet Web
sites for easy access to internal documents and processes for their staff.)
Around that time I decided to have my own domain on the internet
and had my web site hosted on a local ISP site with my email redirected to a POP3
mailbox. Once ADSL broadband came my way I decided having to pay the ISP to host
my web, my domain and my email, that I had to do something about it and do it
alone or DIY for a better term.
First of all I setup my LAN to be connected permanently on the
internet. As I already had a web server running, having that on the net was half
done. I then set up a mail server on the same machine to collect/receive
the mail direct.
Originally I still had the domain hosted by the ISP as Dynamic
DNS hosting for full domains was not available at the time only for sub domains.
I cheated a little by having a blank framed web page on the ISP server redirect
to my own server using a dynamic DNS sub domain. Don't worry too much about the terminology
just yet, I'll get to that shortly.
Once Dynamic DNS was available for full domains it was a matter
of re-delegating my domain to a Dynamic DNS host. Now I fully run my own domain
from my own site.
Ok some insight into the terminology, DNS itself stands for
Domain Name Service. DNS is what translates a host or domain name like yourdomain.com
into an IP Address like 192.168.2.8 . Humans
like to use names but computers still prefer numbers! The majority of domain
names are static and never change which means DNS servers aren't really designed
to cater for domains if their IP address changes. This is where Dynamic DNS
comes in, although not really that recent there was a need to be able to host a
domain where the IP address may change, believe it or not mostly for dialup
hosts! With the advent of ADSL and Cable this was more so.
ADSL has the unfortunate ability to change IP addresses at a
whim in some cases, usually from a network outage (Yes, they happen, deal with
it!) or rebooting your own PC, Cable is not so prone to this and is usually
static. Most Cable/ADSL providers nowadays do provide static IP's but at a
premium.
What's in a domain name? There is more to a domain name than
meets the eye. What you type in the address bar of your browser and even though
we read it left to right the network reads it from right to left. The first part
(or last!?) is the TLD (Top Level Domain/Designator), this is the part that is
originally meant to indicate what sort of entity you are going go to and
consists of common TLD's like .com/.net/.org/.gov etc. I say MEANT because nowadays
it's mostly lost with .com's being almost anything. There can also be a country
designator such as .au/.nz/.uk and I understand that .us is now available to US
domains.
The next part is the domain itself ie DOMAIN.com and usually
points to the network associated with the domain entity. Most companies or
organisations will have its own network which the domain will point to.
The last part which we most commonly see as WWW on web sites is
actually a host or machine that you are actually talking to. WWW is not the only
host name around and is merely a common name for the web server on that domain.
Other common hosts seen are FTP.domain.net
or USERS.domain.org but is not
restricted to these. Most people would call their PC's by a name, its this which
is called the host name (even if you refer to it as a terminal). Some web sites
don't even use a host name but just the domain name, one example is telstra.com
. So www.xyz.com.au consists of host.domain.tld.country
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