Internet Technology Basics

Clients and Servers
  • Both are computers, depends on their purpose
  • Networking’s purpose is to get ‘data’ from one to the other
  • …. even when they are on the other side of the world
Take a look at
$ ping salas.com
$ traceroute salas.com
$ open http://map-on-net.com
Basic Terms
  • MAC address: Media Access Controll address
  • IP Address: Internet Protocol Address
  • Domain name: brandeis.edu
  • DNS: DOmain Name System
MAC addresses, IP addresses and DNS
  • User types in a domain name
  • Target computer is identified by a MAC address
  • So: Need a phonebook of some kind
  • DNS: distributed name service
Also take a look at
$ open http://map-o-net.com/
$ open http://icicle.dylex.net/~ipmap/
More about IP
  • So the IP address is for 1 specific ‘host’ or server (as usual there are exceptions :)
  • IP is the way servers talk ‘to each other’ to get a packet of bits between them
  • Conceptually, ‘send these bits to this ip address’
  • What’s a port number
  • TCP/IP: what it means