William T Wilson wrote: > No. DNS is only necessary if you want to go on the Internet. If you are > not on any network (or if you only have a home LAN) you can do everything > you need with the /etc/hosts file.
Sort of... Strictly speaking, DNS is not required for internet access. More accurately, an end user does not have to set up DNS on his/her machine to enable him/her to go onto the internet. The internet service providers provide one or more of their own DNS servers for the end user to use. Alternatively, it would be possible to use the /etc/hosts file to hold the names and ip addresses of each machine on the internet, but this would be totally impractical. DNS is used instead for this reason. Matthew
