Internet Domains

Source: Wikipedia

Domain name syntax: A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels, that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com.

  • The right-most label conveys the top-level domain; for example, the domain name www.example.com belongs to the top-level domain com.
  • The hierarchy of domains descends from the right to the left label in the name; each label to the left specifies a subdivision, or subdomain of the domain to the right. For example: the label example specifies a node example.com as a subdomain of the com domain, and www is a label to create www.example.com, a subdomain of example.com. This tree of labels may consist of 127 levels. Each label may contain from 1 to 63 octets. The empty label is reserved for the root node. The full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 ASCII characters in its textual representation. In practice, some domain registries may have shorter limits.
  • A hostname is a domain name that has at least one associated IP address. For example, the domain names www.example.com and example.com are also hostnames, whereas the com domain is not. However, other top-level domains, particularly country code top-level domains, may indeed have an IP address, and if so, they are also hostnames.


SubDomains

Computers use numbers (called the IP, or Internet Protocol) to identify locations in web-space: we humans prefer to work with words. The way we convert from letters to numbers (and vice versa) is via a Dynamic Naming Service (DNS).

RIPnet pays an annual fee to a DNS company (we use NoIP.com) to link the name string "RIPnet" with an IP location in cyberspace, thus creating the RIPnet Domain. To keep costs down, we register this in the more affordable "info" domain, thus our final address is "RIPnet.info", and our DNS service allocates us the IP "14.200.88.126."

For an annual cost of around $30 I have remote access to all services available on my home server via the web, as well as a home for RIPnet.

One unintended but useful result of this arrangemet is that it is possible to create multiple "sub-domains", as explained above. These subdomains can be directly accessed on the web by appending thier name to the main IP, eg: sillyname.ripnet.info. So friends and family, if you have something you need/want to share online, let me know!

These are the subdomains already being hosted by RIPnet.info:

photos.ripnet.info The RIPnet photo gallery, also available as a stand-alone entity.
perry.ripnet.info Perry family files:Col's photographs, family tree,/ family history etc.
sdd2.ripnet.info A school project by the son ofsome friends of mine, Josh Browne & one of his schoolmates, Luke Hayes. Warning: Turn down your speakers before checking this out! I am informed that "Epic Sax Guy" is there purely for the sake of their teachers agravation, so it is excusable I guess. It does however become remarkably old remarkably quickly. That being said, it is still worth a look; the boys did some good work an this one.

We also retain legacy copies of the website, in case anyone is interested...

v1.ripnet.info The first effort using iWeb (the pre-installed wysiwyg Mac software), from around 2007.
v2.ripnet.info Version 2: learning to use Dreamweaver and how to write HTML code, Dec 2012.
ripnet.info Version 3, the current version. Using HTML5. Dec 2014.