Revision [31435]
This is an old revision of hostname made by s243a on 2016-10-24 01:38:26.
It may be used by a network programs to identify devices in the network.
When a hostname is is used to identify an entity in the wider internet (i.e. An Internet Host) we typically call it a domain name.
However, in the case of the internet the relationship between host-name and device is more abstract since not all computers on the internet may see the equate the same physical server with an internet host name. An example application of this is geographic load balancing. In this type of architecture the servers in the cluster and/or content delivery system the DNS name server responds with ip address for a given DNS request based on how close the host is to the server in the cluster.
related threads
HOSTNAME fixes ROX slowness problem - SOLVED by gcmartin
gcmartin's rant about hostname, MAC address and ip addresses
