Boomer eZine - The Boomer Entrepreneur Magazine

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I32_111706.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com.

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Authors Comments

2. Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3. Changing Web Hosts

4. What is DNS and how does it work?

Author's Comments

I am still working intensely on the hunting car. For fun, I did take a couple of hours and post a few pages in my “play” website www.quail-hunter.com. I am going to add a little at a time to it during the hunting season this year. Right now, my additions are pictures of the rebuilding of the hunting car so if you are curious, go to the site and see how a hunting car is built from a VW bus.

I AM PLANNING TO PUBLISH A SHORT ISSUE OF BOOMER EZINE ON NOVEMBER 24. Tim Knox interviewed me for his radio show and then wrote a column from the interview. I will publish it in the Thanksgiving issue.

No video this week. The hunting car rebuild is absorbing my extra time.

Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

No input from readers this week! Surely you have questions. I know that I do. Send them in and let’s see if I can find the answer.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm and give us your input. With your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.

Changing Web Hosts

Last week, I told you that we were changing web hosts since our previous host was getting out of the business. I sat down at the computer and did most of the work on Saturday afternoon.

To change hosts, you must find a new web host which I did at www.Hostmonster.com. Once you get your user name and password, you log on the control panel and set up your domain names. Hostmonster allows unlimited domain names for the flat rate of $4.95 per month (two year contract). I set up 31 domain names in the process.

Why so many names? We usually register domain names that are similar to the main domain name so someone cannot register the similar domain and take advantage of our traffic when the viewer enters our domain name incorrectly. As an example, if the surfer enters boomerezine.com instead of boomer-ezine.com, we want the viewer to come to our site, not someone else’s. We have registered boomerezine.com and it will automatically forward to the correct site, boomer-ezine.com. Try it.

Hostmonster requires that you go to your registrar and change the DNS (domain name servers) for your domain to the Hostmonster domain name servers which are NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM and NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM. (See next article about DNS). This will tell anyone of the Internet where to go to find your web site.

We use a company called GKG.net for our domain registrations. I went there and selected all the domain names for which I wanted to change the DNS information and in one mass change, I changed them all to point to the Hostmonster domain name servers.

Setting up these domain names and redirects is simple. Hostmonster uses Apache Server so the control panel is familiar. Click the icon for Add-On Domains and enter the domain name and folder name you will use for storing the domain information. Enter the password for the domain and that is all. Once the domain is set up, you can specify if you want to redirect it.

This change of web hosts was easy since I only had one page sites. If the sites had been of many pages with data bases, this would have been a real problem. If you are going to build a large site, research the web host before you start to see if they will be in the business for the long haul.

What is DNS and how does it work?

DNS stands for domain name system. This is a fascinating system that enables the Internet to work. The main job of the DNS is to take the alpha domain name that you enter into your browser and translate it into the numeric IP (internet protocol) address that computers understand.

The site where you register your domain holds the main DNS record for your domain. This record points to where your website is hosted. When we first set up our domains on GKG.net, the DNS record pointed to GKG since the domains were parked on GKG. When we created websites using web hosts outside of GKG, we changed the DNS server record on GKG to point to the DNS server of the hosting website. We have some sites on Hostmonster.com and some on Hostexcellence.com. If you look at our domain registration records on GKG, the DNS server records will either say Primary - NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM, Secondary – NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM, or Primary - NS1.HOSTEXCELLENCE.COM, Secondary – NS2.HOSTEXCELLENCE.COM.

The site where you are going to host your site will tell you the names of its name servers so you can change the record on your domain registration site to point to the web host name servers.

DNS servers are specified as primary and secondary. If for some reason, the primary name server does not respond, the browser will automatically query the secondary name server.

When someone enters www.boomer-ezine.com into the browser, it goes onto the Internet and looks for a DNS server to resolve the alpha name to the proper IP address. There are certain companies or organizations that are responsible for certain types of web addresses. Network Solutions, Inc. is responsible for all .COM addresses so the DNS server at Network Solutions (or a similar root server) would be accessed to get the proper IP address. When the URL was matched to the IP address, the returned IP address is 66.116.252.10. Your browser would then use this IP address to load the home page of Boomer eZine.

If you enter http://66.116.252.10 into your browser address window, you will also get Boomer eZine. You can use the IP address of a site to access it directly as well as the domain name.

Just think of the logistics of this system. There are billions of IP addresses used on the Internet. The DNS is basically a large, distributed database used to translate alpha domain names into the numeric IP address that the Internet can use to locate a particular computer on the Internet.

The database is distributed since certain servers are the master servers for certain types of domain names. The United Kingdom is in charge of all .uk domains, Russia is in charge of all .ru domains, and so on. Yet all of these servers are tied together to maintain a naming and lookup system so no domain name is duplicated on the Internet.

I recommend that you read the article about DNS on the How Stuff Works website at http://www.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm. This article does a good job explaining in more detail how this amazing database works.

Just remember that every time you enter a domain name or an email address, the DNS servers are working for you to resolve the alpha name to an IP address and give you the webpage you want. It all is done is milliseconds between your browser and multiple DNS servers and you don’t ever realize that it has happened. The webpage you wanted appears and that is all you really care about. ….. Amazing!

That wraps up our issue for this week. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe

www.boomer-ezine.com

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Administrative Details …………….

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