[ Thanks to Puma
for this link. ]
“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…”