Before You Begin

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The Domain Name is typically the name of the network (i.e. planetlinux.com)

that the machine is connected to. This will also be supplied by the network

administrator. If the machine connects to the Internet through an Internet

Service Provider (ISP) then the domain name is typically the domain of the

provider.

The Full Name is constructed from the Host Name and the Domain Name.

If the machine is named fred and the domain is somewhere.net then the

full name becomes: fred.somewhere.net. This is the name that others will

use when attempting to contact this machine with telnet or FTP or any other

remote login client, so this represents the  complete address  of the machine

in question. Typically a  name server  is used to convert this  full name  into

an IP address for the site. When a site is not accessible with its full name, but

is accessible by its IP address, this indicates that the system being used has

no DNS facilities available or the IP address hasn't been registered through

the Internic. Declaration of these servers is done in /etc/resolv.conf and will

be discussed in detail later in this section.

The IP Address that corresponds to the Full Name is a string made up out

of the numbers between 0 and 255 and the dot (.) character. A typical IP

address has the form: 192.64.1.1 and represents the  address  of the target

machine. If your ISP can provide  static  IP addresses, you will be able to

declare the address that they assign, at installation time. If your connection

to the Internet uses dynamic IP addressing, supply the address 0.0.0.0 as a

value to fill the entry.

The Netmask is a string of bits used to determine whether a given address is

on the local sub net or outside of it. Debian installation assumes a class C

network and provides the default value of 255.255.255.0. This value is used to

compute several other addresses for the system. If the machine belongs to a

broader (or more restricted) network the system administrator will know the

correct value to provide for the netmask.