Term for “IP address or DNS name” [closed]

softwareengineering.stackexchange https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/398823

Question

We have a column in a database table that can hold either an IP address or a DNS name, and we're struggling to name it without leaning one way or another.

Is there a "standard" term that means "IP address or DNS name"? Please include a reference to a reliable source.

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Solution

There is no authoritative standard. In the IETF documentation, you'll find url, urn, uri but none refer to either a resource name or IP address (e.g. the urn may refer to a number such as an ISBN, but it requires a prefix for that).

But if you look at man pages of popular tools like ping or traceroute the usual term used is host which is interpreted either as an ip address or as a symbolic name (which can be DNS name but also a good old local hostname). Note that depending on your OS you'll also find target or destination.

You can find similar use of the general "host" concept to designate the machine behind either an IP address or a name in some popular networking libraries such as poco.

OTHER TIPS

Is there a "standard" term that means "IP address or DNS name"?

No, AFAIK there's no standard term describing such.

If you really want to have this in a single DB table column, you should name it for what values could be there actually, e.g. IPAddrOrDNSName.

Though (depending on usage), you might prefer to have two distinct columns like IPAddress and DNSName, since the IP-Address could be used directly with the client code accessing the database, while the DNS name needs some extra processing to determine the underlying IP-Address.

At least another boolean column like IPAddrUsed might be helpful, to indicate what's really stored in that table column.

Is there a "standard" term that means "IP address or DNS name"?

Site could be used.

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