Chapter10.Delivering the Goods to the Right Street (IP) Address
Chapter 10. Delivering the Goods to the Right Street (IP) AddressWhat You Will Learn After reading this chapter, you should be able to
When people use computers, they like to use names to refer to other computersespecially names that are easy to remember. For instance, it's a lot easier to remember something like http://www.cisco.com, instead of a number like 198.133.219.25. As it turns out, you could plug either the name or the number into your browser's URL field to get Cisco's home page, but the name is much easier to remember. Computers, however, find it more convenient to identify each computer using a number. Computers, working together with networking devices called routers, deliver data from one computer to another. So, although a human might prefer to use names like http://www.cisco.com, computers and routers prefer to forward data to http://www.cisco.com using the server's numeric address, such as 198.133.219.25. In the previous two chapters, you focused on application protocols and how they use TCP for some common functions. However, to focus on those protocols, those chapters avoided several issues. For instance, when a user types http://www.cisco.com, how does she know where the web server is? How does the PC know where to send the data? Assuming Cisco's web server is on a different LANwhich is likelyhow do other networking devices, such as routers, know how to deliver the bits to the web server? The next four chapters finally get around to answering those questions. In this chapter, you learn some important details about the Internet Protocol (IP), including how IP addresses work. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 173