See Alex Sherwin's response.
Again, I am sorry that this is all not obvious. The most important point about asadmin is that it is a remotable admin client. You can have asadmin running on your laptop and all your domains on other (big) machines and still, you can manage all of them from your laptop. That brings in a fine point about asadmin that ~95% of its commands are "remote", working on a particular "domain" and work based on that domain's admin server's 5-tuple -- host name, admin port-number, admin user name, password and security status. The default values for 3 of them make it indistinguishable what asadmin really does. Since default values are "localhost", "4848" and false for host, port and security status respectively, it's not immediately clear that asadmin running on "localhost" would actually send an HTTP request to the domain that's listening on 4848 on "localhost".
Hope this makes it clear(er).
Regards,
Kedar
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