The person that helped me out with the name resolution problem also took the time to explain a few points about rebooting. I've included them here because they make for good novice-reading. There isn't much need to reboot a Unix box.
Most daemons provide some mechanism for restarting themselves.
In theory, you should never have to reboot unless you've had a power failure or have installed a new kernel or a major upgrade of the whole system. Some daemens come with a helper tool. IP numbers IP numbers are assigned to network interfaces, not computers. If a computer has two network cards, each network card will have a different address. The same computer can be known by more than one IP and be connected to more than one sub-net.