On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, Tim Wescott wrote: > Thank you for the useful information, and for the reminder of the depths > of my ignorance. Perhaps you could help out even more by illuminating the > difference between what my router is doing when it assigns IP addresses, > and what a nameserver is?
Tim, Your router passes packetes based on their IP address. That is, it routes the packets from one host/network/domain to another host/network/domain. It needs to know where the destination host is located relative to the sending host's location. That's where the DNS (Domain Name Servers) come into play. People remember names more easily than numbers, so we assign names to our individual machines and domains. You might have thishere.mydomain.com, and thatthere.mydomain.com. Your router will know they are both local by looking in /etc/hosts. If the destination is remote from your local network, then the router needs to query a DNS server (defined in /etc/resolv.conf) to find where to push the packet on its next step. Because computers work better with numbers than with words the DNS servers are larger versions of /etc/hosts, but they associate a name with an IP address. A Google search will give you all the information you want. > If I'm going to play those games I may as well just assign the desktop > with a fixed address. We live out in the boonies with enough power outages > that the network gets a complete power-down and power-up several times a > month in the winter; that would scramble the IP addresses each time and I > certainly don't want to try to chase after it. For a small, home network that's not adding or changing hosts a lot static IP addresses work very well. > Going back a bit -- there's no way I can just ping by name? Sure. Once you associate that name with an IP address in /etc/hosts. Rich -- Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity Credibility Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Innovation <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
