General Considerations
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General Considerations
What is a domain name ? abc.com
What is an email address ? somebody@somecompany.com
What is a URL ? http://www.somecompany.com
What is an IP address ? 123.456.789.123
Which internet services do you need or want ?
Domain Names
A domain name is like a regular company name that you conduct business as this entity.
Domain names are assigned to the first person whom requests to do business as that corporation entity on the internet. These domain names are used for communicating with anyone anywhere in the world.
Sometimes corporate trademarks of large corporations are purposely or inadvertantly assigned to a person not commonly assoicated with that corporation.
eg: mtv.com, kaplan.com, frys.com etc
ie. the "wild-wild-west" claim to fame where the various corporations shoot-it-out in court, to decide who owns the rights to that internet domain name
Is your Domain name portable ? ( does it follow you if you move ? )
Is your email, web, ftp, gopher serviced by the same Internet Server ?
IP Addresses
An IP address is like the company street address to find your place of business.
In the case of the internet, there is only a limited number of IP addresses made available to the whole world.
Once all these IP addresses has been assigned, there is no more...
It is analygous to the statement "there is no more real estate to build on"
These
IP addresses are REQUIRED
in order to get onto the internet.
All IP addresses are of the format: www.xxx.yyy.zzz ( e.g. 198.147.196.14 )
The domain names, eg. abc.com, are NOT required to conduct business on the internet.
The domain names are a simplified human readable form of an IP addresses.
Some of the Most Popular Internet Services
Free Software
Email
Allows you to send email to anyone in the world
Web
Seems to be the "hot topic" of the day
News
Allows you to read, reply peoples comments about many subjects
FTP
Allows anyone to transfer files between any two machines
Telnet
Allows you access to any computer on the internet,
provided you have an account on it
IRC
Allows you to talk to other people on the internet
Gopher
Similar to Web pages, but no graphics if any at all
Archie
A search engine that finds stuff on FTP sites
"Search Engines"
Allows you to find "anything" on the internet
whois
Allows you to find out about people on the net
ping
Allows you to see if the other machine is up and running
InternetPhone
Allows you to do worldwide long distance phone calls
Video Conferencing
Allows you to do worldwide video conferencing
etc, etc, etc
Terms & Conditions & Restrictions
Acceptable Uses Policy for the Internet
Net-ettiquette .. what not to do ..
Legal Issues & Liability
General Considerations General Considerations 
LMML