High, I feel really newbish asking this (I almost posted in the newbie forum, but decided it was best here), but when setting up my Linux distribution (Slackware 10.1), in the network configuration I choose to assign a static IP address and it asks me for a hostname and a domain name for that particular machine. What do these do exactly? I figure the hostname is the name of the computer, which would resolve to its IP address on my LAN, but what does the domain name do? Is this just some arbitrary value, or does it affect anything? Do all my machines need to have the same domain name in order to communicate on the LAN?
Thanks in advance.

Hostname is your computer name like "computer1". However, it will not resolve to an ip address on your LAN because your network will not know what computer1 is. That is where the domain name will come in play. So, if you own the domain "blah.com", the domain name of that computer is "computer1.blah.com".

-twantrd

OK, so what if I don't own a domain name?

Then you put nothing in there.

-twantrd

It won't let me put nothing in there, I leave it blank and just push OK and it stays on the same screen until I input something.

AFAIK, if this is just a home network making something up should be OK.