"In the not to distant past only a small segment of the population had computers in their home. In the past few years, this has
changed drastically. It is now the rare home without a computer, and it is becoming even more common to have multiple computers in
a house. As computers moved from the office to the home, so have other technologies. One very interesting one that has great
benefits with multiple computers is networking. Home users who have two or more computers are now beginning to network them and
seeing the many advantages of this. Setting up a network, though, is like everything else in the world: for the many advantages,
there are some new obstacles that must be overcome. I will assume that you have already set up basic TCP/IP networking on your
computer(s) and have read the Net-3 HOWTO located at the Linux Documentation Project."
"One of the features of TCP/IP networks is name resolution. People like to refer to things by word names. Computers, and specifically
TCP/IP, refer to computers (known as hosts) by numbers or IP addresses. The conversion of these human-friendly names to IP
addresses is called name resolution and there are several ways to perform it."
"To understand this process and the tools used, I will walk through a hypothetical resolution. Let's suppose you simply want to ping
another host on the internet. At a shell you would type ping www.linux.com. We are not concerned here with the actual ping
traffic, but with the steps performed before the actually echo requests (pings) are sent..."
