> The DNS name of the Windows machine is the combination of the DNS host
> name and the DNS domain that you setup on the machine. I think the
> misunderstanding is that you assume this combination will
> somehow appear as known DNS name of the machine via some
> DNS server on the network - that's not the case.

I don't assume that - I merely point it that it clearly has no
relationship to the DNS (unless you explicitly make it that way).
So, I wonder why they call it the DNS name - they could have just
as well called the "LDAP name", or the "NIS name". In either case,
setting the name would have no impact on the respective naming
infrastructure.

> FWIW, you can do the same on a Linux box, i.e. setup the host name
> and domain to some completely bogus values. And as David pointed out,
> without also updating the /etc/hosts on the Linux, you always get the
> resolver error with hostname -f I mentioned earlier on (which does
> a DNS lookup), so there's no real connection to the DNS system on
> Linux either.

Yes, but Linux (rightly) calls it the "hostname", not the "DNS name".