Naming protocol. Names often start with type of protocol www.cs.niu.edu (web), ftp.cdrom.com (ftp site), etc. Although a good idea, this is not a requirement. Some sites reserve several alternative names. Also, some browsers will supply www if unqualified name a miss. Right most domain qualifier must be one of the recognized root domains. Each label or qualifier (between dots) can be up to 63 characters. Total length <= 253 characters - www.completelyfreesoftware.com. Names must be at least 2 qualifiers long but can be up to 127. 3 or 4 total most common. www.cs.niu.edu. ASCII - letters, numbers, hypen - ICANN now allows international characters (Unicode) to be remapped to ASCII. (2009) The ASCII remap may read like giberish but provide a unique identifier. There is no relation between name and ip other than a name must resolve to a single ip. At the top level under root servers, the DNS systems are somewhat isolated. .com handled by one system, .edu by another, etc. At this level, ownership of each top-level domain by individual organizations or shared between a few to encourage some competition. See InterNIC.net for a list of many of the DNS registry providers. If new top level domains become available, they will be for sale/lease for $185000 initial / $25000/yr. Owner will then be able to charge for domain names under that top domain. List of IANA recognized Top Level Domain Names" List of new TLD names dig +trace evaluations.cs.niu.edu eval.cs.niu.edu www.microsoft.com netstat -a nmap 131.156.145.51 nmap -n -sP -v 131.156.145.0/24 arp