Does your network speak FQDN?

Endpoint Central | August 28, 2007 | 1 min read

[ <b>Mood:</b> Angry ]<br />[ <b>Currently:</b> Working ]<br />Recently, happened to trouble shoot and fix a FQDN related issue in my local windows test environment. My two cents on this,

FQDN stands for Fully-Qualified Domain Name. The catch here is the word ‘qualified’ which means specific or particular or absolute. For eg., The domain name “romanus.desktopcentral.com.” is fully-qualified because it gives the full location of the specific domain that bears its name within the whole DNS name space. Technically, ?com? is the top level domain (TLD) which contains a subdomain ?desktopcentral? that in turn contains subdomain ?romanus?, giving the full domain name for ?romanus? as ?romanus.desktopcentral.com.?. You can find the last dot “.” which make it unambiguous. This shows the fact that one can refer unambiguously to the name of any computer using its FQDN from any name space. Hence, FQDN makes the softwares interpret the name to start at the root and then follow the sequence of domain details from right to left, going top to bottom within the tree.

If the DNS is not proper or the client computers are not using the correct DNS server, you can experience issues while using FQDN. However, you’ll be able to communicate with host or relative or partial names. In our example, romanus. Obviously it is ambiguous, if you have more than one namespace it might run into issues and confusions while communicating like this.

The reason to share it at this juncture with you admin folks is to get feedbacks on your FQDN enabled networks or related experience. Is your network really speaking FQDN?