debiandomain-namehostnamelinuxnetworking
I have several machines running Debian, and during install, I left the domain name field blank. This hasn't affected anything so far, but I'm curious what the correct thing to set that field to is if you don't have a registered web domain and your IP is dynamically set (http://www.whatsmyip.org/ gives a different IP every few months). Apologies if this is a newb question, but I can't find any results via Google.
What is the proper domain name for a home desktop with a dynamic IP address?
It is usually written in the form,
hostname.domain.com-- for example
If you are in (say) a college campus named called 'The-University',
and its domain is called 'theuniversity.org',
a machine on the campus network called 'mymachine' would be addressed as,
'mymachine.theuniversity.org'.
If you were trying to connect to this machine from your home network,
you would address it with that full name.
The domain part would reach you to the campus network
and the hostname would let you reach the exact machine in the campus.
I am avoiding the details of IP Addressing and gateways here.
For this reason, while accessing the machine from another machine within the campus
may work with just the hostname (mymachine) without the use of the domain name.
To taken an analogy, if you are in the same city, the street name suffices.
But, to address a place in another city, you would usually add the city name after the street.
For a more detailed reading
the Wikipedia page on Domain Name Service could be a good starting place.
You need to register the domain and then change the DNS records to point to that ip address. Is it static or dynamic?
Free alternative: open an account with dyndns.org and you can select from ~20 domains and have a your domain.theirdomain.com
For Example: In GoDaddy, I have a domain.me. I want to point this to my home IP address 74.x.x.x. I registered my domain.me address and now I can edit the DNS to point www.domain.me to 74.x.x.x
Best Answer
While associating with a domain isn't required, it's still useful to associate with one to avoid problems with hostname lookups of the host in question getting forwarded higher up in the DNS hierarchy. In most cases, having
.localas domain is appropriate, as you will most likely be behind a router that does not forward your DNS name. I've also seen some systems use.homein place of this..localis considered best-proctice, as a sensible router will not forward requests for hostnames belonging to this domain, so if you for some weird reason have a server namedmicrosoft.comat home, it will be treated locally, seeing as its FQDN will then bemicrosoft.com.local.Another approach is what I'm doing since I have various machines and servers spread all over, and at home I use my desktop computer as part of my domain name. My DNS servers has a DNS entry for my desktop, with my router forwarding various services (
ssh, mainly) to it.Also, I find this to be highly relevant, as changing the domain of a server can be more complicated than changing your legal name.: