1. Introduction

As soon as you deal with more than one computer, you need to distinguish between them. For example, to tell your system administrator that your computer is busted, you might say, "Hey Ken. Goon is down!"

Computers also have to be able to distinguish between themselves. Thus, when sending mail to a colleague at another computer, you might use the command "mail libes@goon".

In both cases, "goon" refers to a particular computer. How the name is actually dereferenced by a human or computer need not concern us here. This essay is only concerned with choosing a "good" name. (It is assumed that the reader has a basic understanding of the domain name system as described by [2].)

By picking a "good" name for your computer, you can avoid a number of problems that people stumble over again and again.