Subj : The Open Root Server Confederation To : Rich Wonneberger From : Tobias Ernst Date : Thu Mar 15 2001 08:46 am Hallo Rich! RW> Fhould there be a '.' after the org?? org./ RW> ^ Sure. DNS works like this: If you do NOT put a dot after a domain name, your Resolver will first search for the name whatever.you.typed.org.YOURDOMAIN This is what the "domain ..." entry in \mptn\etc\resolv2 is for. e.g., if you have set "domain t-online.de", your resolver would search for whatever.you.typed.org.t-online.de Only after you resolver realizes that this host doesn't exist it will also try to search what you typed without appending your domain, e.g. on the second try it would really search whatever.you.typed.org However, if you type a dot after your input, you tell your resolver that this is in fact a fully qualified domain name and that it should NOT attempt to "complete" this name by adding your domain name. I.e. if you enter "whatever.you.typed.org.", the resolver would directly search for "whatever.you.typed.org" People usually don't type those dots at the end because the additional lookup does not cost much overhead and top level domain names are pretty unique. E.g. if you type "www.ibm.com" you don't run into the risk of finding a host like "www.ibm.com.yourdomain", because nobody names hosts "com", "org", "net", "xx" (where xx is a two-letter country abbrevation"). Now, if people create additional root name servers (and the one mentioned here is by far not the only such project), soon there will be thousands of new top level domains. Consequently, those will no longer be unique, and there will exist, for example, a TLD "news" as well as hosts named "news" (like "news.com") etc. Then, you will often not get what you want when you don't finish your host name entry with a dot, so it is good practice to accustom oneselft to always typing a dot behind a host name to designate it as a fully qualified name. Viele Gre, Tobias --- Msged/2 TE 06 (pre) * Origin: Unisched - Die Lsung fr den Fido-Tossertask! (2:2476/418) .