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Old 21st May 2009
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phoenix phoenix is offline
Risen from the ashes
 
Join Date: May 2008
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Computers only know about IP addresses, and only connect via IP addresses. Period.

Humans know about hostnames and prefer to use symbolic hostnames. Hence, DNS was born, to allow us simple humans to use nice names for servers. All the underlying communication, though, happens using just IPs.

Some protocols, like HTTP, allow the remote hostname to be included, to allow for things like virtualhosts (multiple unique hostnames all pointing to a single IP). SSH is not one of these protocols.
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