| Devices connected to the Internet are called nodes . Nodes that are computers are called hosts . Each node or host is identified by at least one unique number called an Internet address or an IP address. Most current IP addresses are four bytes long; these are referred to as IPv4 addresses. However, a small but growing number of IP addresses are 16 bytes long; these are called IPv6 addresses. (4 and 6 refer to the version of the Internet Protocol, not the number of the bytes in the address.) Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are ordered sequences of bytes, like an array. They aren't numbers , and they aren't ordered in any predictable or useful sense. An IPv4 address is normally written as four unsigned bytes, each ranging from 0 to 255, with the most significant byte first. Bytes are separated by periods for the convenience of human eyes. For example, the address for hermes .oit.unc.edu is 152.2.21.2. This is called the dotted quad format. An IPv6 address is normally written as eight blocks of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons. For example, at the time of this writing, the address of www.ipv6.com.cn is 2001:0250:02FF:0210:0250:8BFF:FEDE:67C8 . Leading zeros do not need to be written. Thus, the address of www.ipv6.com.cn can be written as 2001:250:2FF:210:250:8BFF:FEDE:67C8 . A double colon , at most one of which may appear in any address, indicates multiple zero blocks. For example, FEDC:0000:0000:0000:00DC:0000:7076:0010 could be written more compactly as FEDC::DC:0:7076:10 . In mixed networks of IPv6 and IPv4, the last four bytes of the IPv6 address are sometimes written as an IPv4 dotted quad address. For example, FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210 could be written as FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:118.84.50.16 . IPv6 is only supported in Java 1.4 and later. Java 1.3 and earlier only support four byte addresses. IP addresses are great for computers, but they are a problem for humans , who have a hard time remembering long numbers. In the 1950s, it was discovered that most people could remember about seven digits per number; some can remember as many as nine, while others remember as few as five. ("The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," by G. A. Miller, in the Psychological Review , Vol. 63, pp. 81-97.) This is why phone numbers are broken into three- and four-digit pieces with three-digit area codes. Obviously, an IP address, which can have as many as 12 decimal digits, is beyond the capacity of most humans to remember. I can remember about two IP addresses, and then only if I use both daily and the second is on the same subnet as the first. To avoid the need to carry around Rolodexes full of IP addresses, the Internet's designers invented the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS associates hostnames that humans can remember (such as hermes.oit.unc.edu ) with IP addresses that computers can remember (such as 152.2.21.2). Most hosts have at least one hostname. An exception is made for computers that don't have a permanent IP address (like many PCs); because these computers don't have a permanent address, they can't be used as servers and therefore don't need a name, since nobody will need to refer to them.  | Colloquially, people often use "Internet address" to mean a hostname (or even an email address). In a book about network programming, it is crucial to be precise about addresses and hostnames. In this book, an address is always a numeric IP address, never a human-readable hostname. | |
Some machines have multiple names. For instance, www.ibiblio.org and helios.metalab.unc.edu are really the same Linux box in Chapel Hill. The name www. ibiblio .org really refers to a web site rather than a particular machine. In the past, when this web site moved from one machine to another, the name was reassigned to the new machine so it always pointed to the site's current server. This way, URLs around the Web don't need to be updated just because the site has moved to a new host. Some common names like www and news are often aliases for the machines providing those services. For example, news.speakeasy.net is an alias for my ISP's news server. Since the server may change over time, the alias can move with the service. On occasion, one name maps to multiple IP addresses. It is then the responsibility of the DNS server to randomly choose machines to respond to each request. This feature is most frequently used for very high traffic web sites, where it splits the load across multiple systems. For instance, www.oreilly.com is actually two machines, one at 208.201.239.36 and one at 208.201.239.37. Every computer connected to the Internet should have access to a machine called a domain name server , generally a Unix box running special DNS software that knows the mappings between different hostnames and IP addresses. Most domain name servers only know the addresses of the hosts on their local network, plus the addresses of a few domain name servers at other sites. If a client asks for the address of a machine outside the local domain, the local domain name server asks a domain name server at the remote location and relays the answer to the requester. Most of the time, you can use hostnames and let DNS handle the translation to IP addresses. As long as you can connect to a domain name server, you don't need to worry about the details of how names and addresses are passed between your machine, the local domain name server, and the rest of the Internet. However, you will need access to at least one domain name server to use the examples in this chapter and most of the rest of this book. These programs will not work on a standalone computer. Your machine must be connected to the Internet. |
