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Internet Domain Name
A domain name is a familiar easier to remember name for computers on the Internet and correspond to the IP numbers that serve as routing addresses on the Internet. The Internet Domain Name System consists of a hierarchically organized directory of all the domain names and their corresponding computers
registered to particular companies and persons using the Internet.
A domain name consists of a series of character strings (called "labels") separated by dots. The right-most label in a domain name is referred to as its "top-level domain" (TLD). The DNS forms a tree-like hierarchy. Every TLD includes many second-level domains (such as "google" in "www.google.com"); each second-level domain can include a number of third-level domains ("www" in "www.google.com"), and so on.
There are different types of TLDs. TLDs with two letters (such as .de, .mx, and .jp) have been established for over 240 countries and external territories and are referred to as "country-code" TLDs or "ccTLDs". TLDs with three or more characters are referred to as "generic" TLDs, or "gTLDs". They are divided into two types, "sponsored" TLDs (sTLDs) and "unsponsored TLDs (uTLDs). One special TLD, .arpa, is used for technical infrastructure purposes.
Contact and other technical information make up the site domain name registration. The registrar keeps the contact information and submits the technical information to a central directory known as the “registry”. The registry provides other computers on the Internet the information necessary to send you e-mail or to find your web site. A registration contract with the registrar sets forth the terms under which your registration is accepted and will be maintained. Information about who is responsible for site domain names is publicly available on a “Whois” site to resolve technical problems and to permit enforcement of
consumer protection, trademark, and other laws.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (http://www.icann.org) is a technical coordination body for the Internet and was created in October 1998.
ICANN coordinates the assignment of the following identifiers that must be globally unique for the Internet to function:
- Internet domain names
- IP address numbers
- Protocol parameter and port numbers
ICANN also coordinates the stable operation of the Internet's root server system.
Whois is a protocol used to find network, domain and host information. Whois records include data on the organizations and the contacts associated with the networks and domains. Whois services operate through a whois server. Anyone can connect to a whois server and send a query; also anyone can run a whois server.
The Internet address space allocation is managed by a number of different organizations. These registries provide IP allocation information through their whois servers.
The most common use of whois is to look up site domain names - to check available domain names before registering or to locate information on the domain name registrant. The whois server for domain registration records is maintained by the organization that is authorized to register domain names and depends on the specific domain name extension. Because there are a number of registrars for the popular .com, .net and .org domains, the actual domain records may not be available from a single whois server.
Internet Protocol (IP)
The Internet Protocol (IP) is "a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork".
Data is sent in blocks called packets or datagrams. The advantage here is that no setup is needed before a host tries to send packets to a host it has not communicated with before. The disadvantage is that IP provides an unreliable datagram service. The packet may arrive damaged, out of order, duplicated, or dropped entirely.
IP Address
The IP address is a number that uniquely identifies a host on a network. Internet users generally use the domain name rather than the numeric IP address.
Internet addresses are also needed for routing purposes, so a high fraction of the addresses is always unused. There are only a limited number of 32-bit IP addresses currently available to be allocated, and the world may soon run out of IP addresses.
Many measures have been taken to conserve existing IPv4 address space (such as CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) and the use of NAT (Network Address Translation) and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)), but the general consensus is that the Internet must upgrade its addressing scheme to the longer 128-bit IPv6 addressing scheme.
IP version 4 :
IPv4 is the current standard protocol for the Internet. The IP addresses consist of 32 bits, and so, theoretically, there should be about 4,294,967,296 (over 4 US billion) unique hosts. In practice, this is not so because of issues in routing.
IPv4 addresses are expressed as a dotted quad, four octets (8 bits) separated by periods. For example, the host known as www.wikipedia.com currently has the number 2,187,229,895, written as 130.94.122.199. Host name resolution to its corresponding address is done by the DNS (Domain Name System).
IP version 6 :
IPv6 is the new, but not yet widely deployed, standard protocol for the Internet. Addresses are 128 bits wide, which should suffice for the foreseeable future. This is a big address space that will be sparsely populated. Thus it is possible to encode more routing information into the addresses themselves.
The address is written as eight 4-digit hexadecimal (16-bit) numbers separated by colons. One string of zeros per address may be left out, so that 1080::800:0:417A is the same as 1080:0:0:0:0:800:0:417A
IPv6 has many improvements over IPv4 including auto renumbering and mandatory use of IPSec. IPSec (IP security) is a standard for securing Internet protocol communications by encrypting and authenticating all IP packets
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