Understanding

TCP/IP Networking
Objectives:
Learn the TCP/IP Protocol Suite Be familiar with the network applications used in the industry that a system admin should be well-verse of. Learn the concepts behind network address and ports

Concepts
TCP/IP Networking
From the users point of view, chances are you are quite familiar with how network tools function. But from the point of a system administrator, there is considerable complexity hidden beneath the surface of common network tools such as e-mail, remote printing, web browsing and etc. For system administrators it is a great deal for you to understand the basic design of TCP/IP networking and for troubleshooting TCP/IP problems.

The Internet Protocol Suite

Layer Application Protocols FTP, HTTP,HTTPS IMAP, IRC, NNTP POP3, SIP SMTP, SNMP SSH, Telnet, Bittorrent (and more) DCCP, SCTP TCP, RTP UDP, IL,RUDP IPv4 IPv6 Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Token Ring, FDDI, PPP RS-232, EIA-422, RS-449

Transport

Network Data link Physical Layer

The Internet protocol suite is the set of communication protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs.

The Network Stack

The basic goal of networking, from the point of view of high-level software is to transfer information from a specific program running on one computer to a specific program running on another computer. One of the problems encountered in achieving the goal of data exchange between programs is in controlling access to the network. If programs such as Mozilla Firefox were allowed to control the network hardware directly, chaos would soon ensue, as programs would interfere with one another. This is the reason why the concept of network stack is implemented. This is a set of small software modules, functioning in series, each of which interfaces with two others or with one other and the network hardware or human. Network applications lie at the top of the stack. These applications communicate with the layer below them and so on until the bottom layer is reached, at which point the data leave the computer and traverse the network to the destination system. At that point, the process is reversed and data travel up the stack to the destination application. See the illustration below.

Application Layer Communication protocols and methods designed for process-to-process communications across an Internet protocol computer network

Transport Layer

Message segmentation: accepts a message from the (session) layer above it, splits the message into smaller units (if not already small enough), and passes the smaller units down to the network layer. The transport layer at the destination station reassembles the message. Message acknowledgment: provides reliable end-to-end message delivery with acknowledgments.

Network Layer The network layer is responsible for packet forwarding including routing through intermediate routers, whereas the data link layer is responsible for media access control, flow control and error checking. Data Link

Media Access Control (MAC) Logical Link Control (LLC)

Network Addresses
One critically important component of any network protocol is addressing. If you are at one computer and want to use resources located on a server, you must have some method of telling your computer how to reach the server. The hostname most of the time takes the form of a URL such as http://hei.donbosco.net Unfortunately, although hostnames of this form are reasonably easy for people to understand, computer works better with numbers. Therefore, although the Internet includes provisions for using hostnames, at its core it relies upon a different addressing scheme: IP addresses. IP addresses are 32-bit or 128-bit (IPv6) numbers that are generally expressed as decimal numbers separated by dots. Example, 192.168.2.1. IP addresses are broken down into two components: a network address and a machine address. This division simplifies the job of the routers which are devices that send traffic between networks because it means the router can be programmed in terms of networks rather than IP address with binary 1s. For instance, 255.255.255.0 places a binary 1 in each bit of the first three bytes of an address, indicating that those first three bytes are the network address and that the final byte is the machine address.

Ports
Once a packet has been routed to a destination, the target computer needs to know what to do with it. This information is conveyed through the use of ports. Each TCP/IP packet is addressed to one of 65 536 ports. By convention, specific server packages listen for traffic on specific ports. Example, web servers listen on port 80 and mail servers open on port 25

Network Applications
E-mail Web FTP Instant Messaging Remote Login P2P file sharing Multi-user Network Games Voice Over IP (VoIP)