As humans, we generally find it easier to remember names rather than numbers. Can you remember everybody's number in your phone's contact list? The use of names not only makes things easier to remember but also makes things a lot more user-friendly when configuring devices and services. This is similar in the case of a complex IP address. Hence, rather than us having to recall an IP address, we use name resolution, which we will learn about in this chapter.
In this chapter, we will look at the four main means of performing name resolution, that is DNS, hosts files, Windows Internet Name Service (WINS), and LMHOSTS files. As a network technician, you will definitely need to understand these systems, as well as how they are configured at the host level, since this will be part of your day-to-day workload.
The following topics will be covered...
