While hostnames are human-friendly, they are not that friendly for devices since their syntax doesn't provide a means of identifying whether a device called Gordons-PC is on a local or remote network. On its own, a hostname would generally be thought of as being local, but this may not always be the case. Therefore, we need to resolve hostnames to an IP address. We will cover IP addresses in more detail in Chapter 11, Understanding IPv4 and Chapter 12, Understanding IPv6, but for the purposes of understanding LANs, I would like to touch upon IPv4 here. An IPv4 address is broken down into two sections:
- A network element
- A host element
The network element is used as a means of identifying the network a device is on, while the ...
