how do i apply address other than ip

[crazycanuck]

I would like to add my own addy to site the program was easier to use and set up that my windows 98 personal webserver but i would like to apply a real addy not an ip address and all documents on it are no help.

[Anonymoose]

www.dyndns.org
www.no-ip.com

[senshi]

you have to understand IP addresing.

most of the stuff that happens on your computer is dealt with in pretty much the same way as on the internet. your request is routed to 127.0.0.1 or 127.1 (same thing) or refered to a localhost. This is your PC's local IP address, it knows that any reference to that address is on the machine that it is running.

Thats why if you thyp http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ into your explorer window, it will try to connect to a http server on your local machine and an ftp server if you typed ftp://localhost/ or which ever protocol you choose to try and access. Addressing is protocol://ipaddress:port/location/item where the item is a .html .jpg .gif .swf etc etc.. file that your wanting to serve up.

Outsiders cant see your local machine so you have to help them. Your PC will have been assigned an external IP address so that people can find your machine on the internet, any request your machine recieves on that external address is routed to.... you geussed it... 127.0.0.1.

IP addresses are not easy to remember or read, they tell you very little about the machine your connecting to, you need something more symbolic and humand readable, in come DNS.

DNS is manythings to different people, DNS to some is in the ISP assidned address, or its a Domain NAme Service offering up domain names, or its a server that runs and resolves domain names on the local LAN and its to ISP's its the servers that help resolve domainname and ip requests.

In this case DNS for us means a domain name to IP addressing service, this is where you make a name that you can remember like myserver.domain.net or www.how-about-this.com both will have an IP address that they resolve to.

the IP address is also a representation of the binary number allocated to your machine, so IP addressing althoug not easily decoded is better than looking at an address made of binary digits, which is very long, imagine all those typos!

Totally confused? Welcome to the world of IP addressing and DNS.