I'm trying to setup a server, but I want to understand everything first.

Apparently, I have to register with a company who'll put my server domain on the root servers. Then I need to use a DNS to get some nameservers to give back to the registration site.

Can somebody point me to a site, or tell me what all these things physically are and why i need them?

I initially thought that you would just register your name to a root server, then, when somebody wants to access your site, they would just go to the root server and find your IP through the nameserver. But now, apperantly, I need to have a nameserver.

Can somebody show me the processes involved in requests that are sent from server to browser. Like, when the browser sends a request, does that request go to the nameserver first, or the root server, and then what happens from there?

Any help would be awesome.

Allright, i think you mixed up a few things. First i lay out a normal webbrowsing communication set.
Ok, you have your faviroute browser up and enter the name of the page you want to visit. After proceding the browser first checks if the required name is in his dns cache (a table of know hostname to ipnumber) If he can´t find the right entry, it queries a nameserver. The nameserver first checks the toplevel domain (all after the last dot). Then sends the adress of the namerserver for this toplevel domain. So the browsers sends a request to this toplevel domain nameserver, which checks if he got the hostname. Most of the time the toplevel domain nameserver sends back the adress of a nother nameserver. This goes on till the name is found or not.
When found the nameserver sends you the ip adress of the hostname. After this your browser connects to this ip using tcp and makes his queires.

So normaly you just have to get your ip into a dnserver and you should be fine. Use a company like http://www.dyndns.org. You can create a account there and have them resolv a hostname to your ip. Just check out there page. There are a lot of other pages which offer similar. Try a search on google.

Greets zhjim

Thanks for putting that all into direct terms. I needed that direct explanation.

So, right now I'm using zoneedit.com. But, why do I need nameserver adresses? Aperantly, I need two nameserver adresses...and I've put them into the domain registrar's website in my account. Are the adresses the what nameservers use to comunicate?

And thanx for the info eh

I wonder that you know that you need two nameservers, if you don´t know what nameservers are good for?
Nameservers are needed to have the hostnames translated into ip adresses. Like normaly you only know the name of a webpage and not its ip adress. So you just ask the nameserver what kind of ip he got for a certain name. you need the ip adress of a server so you can connect to it.

What exactly are you trieng to achive, maybe i can give you further directions.

Basically, you register a domain and then you own it, let's call it bob.com. after you have the domain, you need at least one server to host the domain, let's say you have a web server at a static IP address on The Internet, 1.2.3.4. The next thing you need is a primary and a backup nameserver, these are the two nameservers you are wondering about. The two nameservers will become the "authoritative" (sp?) nameservers for bob.com so they are the DNS servers (nameservers) that the "root" servers will go to when they need to know what IP address belongs to bob.com, www.bob.com, mail.bob.com et/all.

As far as how to get these, you should probably shop around for more domain registrars. Depending on who you register with, you can get anything from just the domain name (and you provide both DNS servers and all servers like web, mail, etc on that domain) to a full service hosting. You can also find the whole range of services in between these two extremes. As was mentioned earlier, http://www.dyndns.org/ provides DNS hosting (they register you with their DNS nameservers) and there are also full service companies like http://www.summitprojects.com/ who will let you pick a domain name and then do everything including build and host your website. An internet search with keywords like Domain, Registration, Hosting, and Nameserver should turn up other companies offering a varied range of these services.

So you do need to buy the domain and you do need two nameservers and you also need servers, like at least a web server, for the domain you buy, but you can definitly find someone to register with who will provide any of these that you do not wish to maintain yourself.