Networking is now not just a thing for businesses, it has become increasingly popular in the home with people wanting to share files and printers with each other. Many people will be coming start coming across some of the jargon so I will explain what some of these acronyms stand for:
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): This refers to a set of rules and standards by which computers can communicate with each other over the Internet and in Local Area Networks (LANs)
IP Address: Every device on a network must have an IP Address; this is a unique address on the network for each device. This takes the form of four numbers, each of which has a value between 0 and 255, for example 216.239.59.104, which is the IP address of the google.co.uk web server.
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol): This is a system on a network that gives out an IP Address to each device when it connects to the network. This saves people from having to manually set an IP address for each machine. Quite often DHCP systems are set up to give the same address to the same machine for an extended period of time
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): This is the technical name for a web address or any other address where you tell an application the location of what you want to see and the manner in which it should access it.
Domain name: A domain name is like an identification label for a website. Our domain name is innovatonitsupport.com. This is part of a top level domain .com which is used for many commercial sites. The domain name for this blog is a sub domain of our main domain blog.innovationitsupport.com. So basically the domain name is everything that appears after “http://” or “http://www.” and before the third “/” in a URL.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): You have probably typed this many times at the beginning of URLs. It tells the browser to display whatever it finds at the address as a web page.
DNS (Domain Name System):This is a naming system that translates a name to an IP address. This allows you to use host names on a network rather than using an IP address and also allows domain names to be used to browse to websites rather than using an IP address. For instance to reach Google you would go to google.co.uk rather than typing their IP address of 216.239.59.104