Re: Ftpapi Digest, Vol 44, Issue 7

[Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

> A host table entry won't work for Charlie since he indicated Chase won't
> provide the IP address to him.

Scott S's point is an important one.  There are many reasons why you 
should never do things by IP address, and why you shouldn't use the host 
table for a network unless you control that network:

a) Translating a domain name to an IP address is sometimes used for load 
balancing.  You can have 10 servers, each at a different IP address, 
simply by changing the IP address in your DNS server, you route the 
request to a different machine.

b) They might be using name-based virtual hosting on your server, where 
multiple names use the same IP address.

c) They might be using DNS for fail-over support.  If one system goes 
down, simply changing their DNS to point to a different address can have 
things running on a backup server in a jiffy.

d) They might simply be avoiding hard-coded IP addresses for network 
management sake.  If they ever decide to change their IP address scheme, 
they can do so without disrupting business, as long as they update their 
DNS server.  You can hardly expect them to keep track of every customer 
who is hard-coding an IP address and notify them. (And why should they?)

e) Or for some other reason, they might decide to move their service to 
another machine.  If you use a domain name, it's easy for them to do, 
they just change DNS.  If you use an IP address, they have to physically 
re-address their computers.  Not so easy!

f) Do you really want to have to hard-code the IP address of every 
computer you ever connect to in your host table?  I mean, sure, if 
there's only one, it's no big deal... but HTTP was designed for the 
masses!  Imagine if every user of the web had to edit their host table 
before they could go to any site on the Internet.  Do you think people 
would use browsers AT ALL?  It'd be a mess.  Then imagine if someone 
wanted to their their IP address and had to get billions of people to 
update their host table (shudder).  Imagine if Google or Amazon had to 
field tech support calls to everyone who needed to update their host 
table to access these sites!  Yikes!

Really...  doing things by a hard-coded IP address or host table is not 
a reasonable way of doing things.  Frankly, folks today expect that you 
know how to set up your computer to talk to the Internet properly.

I've tried to put a guide on how to set up DNS on my web site at the 
following link:
http://www.scottklement.com/httpapi/dns.html
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