DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Reading Domain Names

Now that you know what most top-level domains represent and how their namespaces are structured, you’ll probably find it much easier to make sense of most domain names. Let’s dissect a few for practice:

lithium.cchem.berkeley.edu

You’ve got a head start on this one, as we’ve already told you that berkeley.edu is U.C. Berkeley’s domain. (Even if you didn’t already know that, though, you could have inferred that the name probably belongs to a U.S. university because it’s in the top-level edu domain.) cchem is the College of Chemistry’s subdomain of berkeley.edu. Finally, lithium is the name of a particular host in the domain—and probably one of about a hundred or so, if they’ve got one for every element.

winnie.corp.hp.com

This example is a bit harder, but not much. The hp.com domain in all likelihood belongs to the Hewlett-Packard Company (in fact, we gave you this earlier, too). Their corp subdomain is undoubtedly their corporate headquarters. And winnie is probably just some silly name someone thought up for a host.

fernwood.mpk.ca.us

Here you’ll need to use your understanding of the us domain. ca.us is obviously California’s domain, but mpk is anybody’s guess. In this case, it would be hard to know that it’s Menlo Park’s domain unless you knew your San Francisco Bay Area geography. (And no, it’s not the same Menlo Park that Edison lived in—that one’s in New Jersey.)

daphne.ch.apollo.hp.com

We’ve included this example just so you don’t start thinking that all domain ...