Full articles and other more about networking on: compinfopro.

com PING command - ICMP replies This must be at least one of the most known command from the entire IT&C domain, especially from within network administration and system administration. What is and also what does this command do ? It is a network tool used mostly for troubleshooting network connectivity. With this command you can verify if a certain device can be accessed through an IP network. The reply message, or to be more precise the error message from a destination device can help you a lot in troubleshooting the errors you get on the network, or the problem you are facing on the network. The PING tool sends ICMP messages of type "Echo Request" (which would mean in other words, asking for a reply) through packets addressed to the device we are trying to query. Most of the times these devices we are testing are end devices like computers. What we expect from a computer who just got pinged is an ICMP reply type message also known as an Echo Response. - Destination host unreachable: The device you are trying to PING is down or is not operating on the network. This could also mean you will have to recheck the settings on your device to make sure the host is correctly configured and also check that the routing is working properly because a route to the destination system could not be found. If you are trying to PING something outside of your local network, check if gateway address is correct. - Destination net unreachable: The targeted gateway to the IP address written in the command prompt window could not be reached. Check your computer gateway to be correct and routing table to the IP address. - Destination specified is invalid: An invalid address has been written in the command prompt window. Make sure the format of the address is correct and then try again. - Request timed out: The ping command has timed out because there was no reply from the targeted device. First check if your TCP/IP stack is functioning correctly by pinging 127.0.0.1 . This doesn't mean that your network card is working properly. Now ping your default gateway and make sure you have connectivity. Ping the next hop after the gateway or a device before our faulty device, like a router interface. If you have connectivity this could mean our faulty device, the one we get replies with "request timed out" from has a problem or may be down and not the network channel to the device. If you get reply from another device on the way, but not from the host we are troubleshooting, this could also mean there is no route back to your device. Note: Destination Net Unreachable will show the IP address of the router that tried to route a packet but couldn't find a valid route. Read entire article

About Networking
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Full articles and other more about networking on: compinfopro.com Network Presentation - OSI Model and TCP/IP Model Since everything is connected, I will try to cover as much as I can from the networking field so you can understand the rest of the articles. The down side in this process is that I can't guess the stage of knowledge each of you has reached, that's why some of the things might look too easy and you will have to skip until you find something interesting for you - this is for those of you "experts". However, for the average people, you could just take a look, even if you already know what you read because you might find something that you didn't manage to understand before or you didn't know there is another way too. A network can be as a simple as the connection through a single cable from one computer to another or as complex as a network that spans the globe, like the Internet and this is what I will be trying to cover in this Network Presentation article. There are packets traveling each second from source to destination on each network available in the world. Devices and media are the physical elements or elements of the network. The hardware can be anything from a PC, switch, cabling to the components that might not be so visible like in the case of the wireless media. Devices use IP addresses and MAC addresses to identify themselves on the network environment but before learning more about them, let's first see how a network operates, the layers involved and how network protocols interact. We will be using 2 layered models, the TCP/IP Model and the OSI Model to actually explain the interaction of the protocols and how packets travel from layer to layer when they are processed. Description Is responsible for data output to the user plus encoding and dialog control. Presentation Provides common grounds for the representation between application layers. Session Provides services to the Presentation layer to organize the dialog between parties and to manage the data exchange. Transport Facilitates the communication between different devices on different networks. Network Routing determines the best path possible for devices between networks. Data Link Protocol that takes the role of a controller for hardware devices and media on the network. Physical It's formed of the electrical, mechanical, hardware, functional environment and it enables, maintains and disables physical connections for bit transmission on the media to the destination device. Read entire article About Networking
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OSI Model Application

Full articles and other more about networking on: compinfopro.com Network Address Translation NAT Such service can be used to translate private IP addresses on private LANs to public IPs, by so having access to different resources on the Internet, depending on the case. NAT allows a host using a private IP address to borrow a public IP while accessing the needed resources on the Internet. There are however a few of downsides to this, like performance issues and restrictions but nothing that would not facilitate the use of Internet resources through this method. A few more of those reserved and restricted from use IP addresses are: - The default route: 0.0.0.0 which is a match to all routes when a more specific route is not found (we will soon learn about routes). By using this address we will disable the whole 0.0.0.0/8 block which is everything between 0.0.0.0 and 0.255.255.255. - Loopback address which is mostly known as an IP of 127.0.0.1 used for testing mostly. It is used by hosts for directing traffic to themselves. Services can use this IP instead of the one assigned for communicating with eachother and so they are bypassing the lower layers of the TCP/IP stack because there is no transmission over media. The loopback address is also used for testing the configuration of the TCP/IP stack on the local host. Again the whole range is reserved, which is 127.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.255. Any address on this range will bounce back the packets to original host. - Link-Local Addresses are the addresses in the range of 169.254.0.0 to 169.254.255.255 (169.254.0.0/16) that will be automatically assigned to local hosts by the operating system, when they would fail to get IPs from DHCP server and IP configuration is not available. In the past the unicast IP addresses were classified into specific sizes called class A, B and C addresses. The multicast range contained class D addresses while the class E addresses were experimental. These agreements were also referred to as the Classful Notation or Addressing. Class A was designed for extremely large networks with more than 16 million host addresses and used a network prefix of /8 so the first octet was used to indicate network address. All class A networks require that the most significant bit of the first octet to be a 0. The range of class A networks would be 0.0.0.0/8 to 127.0.0.0/8 without counting the reserved address blocks. To understand better, you can see this displayed in the table below. Class B address space were used for moderate to large networks with more than 65000 hosts. Class B networks use a network prefix of /16. Class B networks also require that the first two bits of the first octet to be 10. The range would be from 128.0.0.0/16 to 191.255.0.0/16. Class C address space was used for small networks of up to 254 hosts. Class C networks use a prefix of /24. The fixed value for the most significant bits in the first octet, which should be the same to match a class C network, should be 110. This means the address range was from 192.0.0.0/16 to 223.255.255.0/16. Read entire article About Networking
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Full articles and other more about networking on: compinfopro.com Subnet Mask - Default Gateway DNS Subnet Mask As I wrote in a past article, an IP address has a network and a host portion. We also discussed about the fact that a network prefix tells us how many bits in the address represent the network portion. To define the network and host part of an address, the devices use the subnet mask represented on a 32 bit pattern. The subnet mask is created by adding a binary 1 for each bit that belongs to the network part, and a 0 for each bit in the host part.We have as an example an IP address of 192.168.0.1/24 where /24 is the prefix length of the network. We will use the same notation as above, green for host bits, blue for network bits. Default Gateway In networking, a gateway is most commonly a router interface while on a TCP/IP network it serves as an access point to another network. The default gateway is the route or the interface where the traffic will be sent to, when an IP address does not match any route in the routing table. In other words a computer or a device knows some routes due to the directly connected networks, but it doesnt know the route to any network. However it will know another interface or route where to send the traffic in order to be delivered to the final destination. The gateway will be on the same subnet as the device. All the traffic that does not match any route on a device, will be sent to this gateway. DNS A Domain Name Service resolves queries of any Internet resource (for example computers and services and many more) into IP addresses. All the Internet resources have a name and an IP. The IPs are used for devices to communicate between themselves, while for people it is more easy to remember names. When we go and type a website name inside a browser, we will say we are accessing for example www.compinfopro.com. However, computers over the Internet will use IP addresses on their binary form to communicate and move data from client to server and backwards and hand you the information you requested on your browser. This is done with the help of the DNS. If we had no DNS running for us, we would have to type the IP address inside a browser, for example http://123.45.123.45 instead of www.compinfopro.com, where names are much more easy to remember than IPs. Read entire article About Networking
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Full articles and other more about networking on: compinfopro.com IP and MAC addresses - layer 2 and 3 addressing IP addresses An IP address is a 32 bit unique address on the network that identifies a networking device or interface at layer 3. For us is more easy to remember and use an address in the decimal dotted format, while at physical layer on the network, these IP addresses are used in a binary form using the same 32 bit representation. For example we can have an IP address of 192.168.0.1 in the decimal dotted form which in binary would be 11000000.10101000.00000000.00000001. For each IP address, we have a portion that actually defines the network address. In other words, some of the 32 bits, with the help of a subnet mask which will be explained soon, define the number of bits that must match for a group of IP addresses to be in the same network. Before going further with this idea you should learn the basic conversions you will need to know to be able to understand the main concept behind networking devices and their communication methods, and also some algorithms you will be using in later study articles. MAC addresses As I wrote before in a previous post, they are represented on a 48 bit scale and they are unique identifiers assigned to network interfaces for communication and addressing purposes on the same network segment. They are mostly used on the Ethernet network technology and also on a variety of other network standards like IEEE 802. MAC addresses are most of the times assigned by manufacturer and stored in the firmware or in some other hardware storage mechanism. MAC addresses are formed of two parts, each having 24 bits. The first section (commonly the first 3 groups) is the Organizationally Unique Identifier or OUI (globally unique) which is a code assigned to manufacturers (by Internet Associations keeping track of such things) so they are identified based on them, telling us who is the manufacturer. The other section, also on 24 bits, is assigned by the manufacturer in any way they please, locally unique. The MAC is represented in HEX notation and has different forms of use from Cisco to day to day activity. IP We already established what an IP address is in a previous post so now we will try to get a bit more into the details and how they are used on the network. Read entire article About Networking
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