So you've just been told you are on a TCP/IP network, you are the new TCP/IP system administrator, or you have to install a TCP/IP system. But you don't know very much about TCP/IP. That's where this book comes in. You don't need any programming skills, and familiarity with operating systems is assumed. Even if you've never touched a computer before, you should be able to follow the material.
This is intended for beginning through intermediate users and covers all the protocols involved in TCP/IP. Each protocol is examined in a fair level of detail to show how it works and how it interacts with the other protocols in the TCP/IP family. Along the way, this book shows you the basic tools required to install, configure, and maintain a TCP/IP network. It also shows you most of the user utilities that are available.
Because of the complex nature of TCP/IP and the lack of a friendly user interface, there is a lot of information to look at. Throughout the book, the role of each protocol is shown separately, as is the way it works on networks of all sizes. The relationship with large internetworks (like the Internet) is also covered.
Each chapter in the book adds to the complexity of the system, building on the material in the earlier chapters. Although some chapters seem to be unrelated to TCP/IP at first glance, all the material is involved in an integral manner with the TCP/IP protocol family. The last few chapters cover the installation and troubleshooting of a network.
By the time you finish this book, you will understand the different components of a TCP/IP system, as well as the complex acronym-heavy jargon used. Following the examples presented, you should be able to install and configure a complete TCP/IP network for any operating system and hardware platform.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP): connection-based services
User Datagram Protocol (UDP): connectionless services
Internet Protocol (IP): handles transmission of information
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP): handles status messages for IP
Routing Information Protocol (RIP): determines routing
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF): alternate protocol for determining routing
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP): determines addresses
Domain Name System (DNS): determines addresses from machine names
Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP): - determines addresses
Boot Protocol (BOOTP): starts up a network machine
File Transfer Protocol (FTP): transfers files
Telnet: allows remote logins
Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP): transfers routing information for external networks
Gateway-to-Gateway Protocol (GGP): transfers routing information between gateways
Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP): transfers routing information for internal networks
Network File System (NFS): enables directories on one machine to be mounted on another
Network Information Service (NIS): maintains user accounts across networks
Remote Procedure Call (RPC): enables remote applications to communicate
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP): transfers electronic mail
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP): sends status messages about the network
— 2 —
TCP/IP and the Internet
Before proceeding into a considerable amount of detail about TCP/IP, the Internet, and the Internet Protocol (IP), it is worthwhile to try to complete a quick outline of TCP/IP. Then, as the details of each protocol are discussed individually, they can be placed in the broader outline more easily, thereby leading to a more complete understanding in the next two chapters.
Just what is TCP/IP? As you saw on Day 1, it is a software-based communications protocol used in networking. Although the name TCP/IP implies that the entire scope of the product is a combination of two protocols—Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol—the term TCP/IP refers not to a single entity combining two protocols, but a larger set of software programs that provides network services such as remote logins, remote file transfers, and electronic mail. TCP/IP provides a method for transferring information from one machine to another. A communications protocol should handle errors in transmission, manage the routing and delivery of data, and control the actual transmission by the use of predetermined status signals. TCP/IP accomplishes all of this.
TCP/IP is not a single product. It is a catch-all name for a family of protocols that use a similar behavior. Using the term TCP/IP usually refers to one or more protocols within the family, not just TCP and IP.
In the first area, you saw that the OSI Reference Model is composed of seven layers. TCP/IP was designed with layers as well, although they do not correspond one-to-one with the OSI-RM layers. You can overlay the TCP/IP programs on this model to give you a rough idea of where all the TCP/IP layers reside. I do that in a little more detail later in this chapter. Before that, I take a quick look at the TCP/IP protocols and how they relate to each other, and show a rough mapping to the OSI layers.
It shows the basic elements of the TCP/IP family of protocols. You can see that TCP/IP is not involved in the bottom two layers of the OSI model (data link and physical) but begins in the network layer, where the Internet Protocol (IP) resides. In the transport layer, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are involved. Above this, the utilities and protocols that make up the rest of the TCP/IP suite are built using the TCP or UDP and IP layers for their communications system.
TCP/IP suite and OSI layers.
It Also shows that some of the upper-layer protocols depend on TCP (such as Telnet and FTP), whereas some depend on UDP (such as TFTP and RPC). Most upper-layer TCP/IP protocols use only one of the two transport protocols (TCP or UDP), although a few, including DNS (Domain Name System) can use both.
A note of caution about TCP/IP: Despite the fact that TCP/IP is an open protocol, many companies have modified it for their own networking system. There can be incompatibilities because of these modifications, which, even though they might adhere to the official standards, might have other aspects that cause problems. Luckily, these types of changes are not rampant, but you should be careful when choosing a TCP/IP product to ensure its compatibility with existing software and hardware.
TCP/IP is dependent on the concept of clients and servers. This has nothing to do with a file server being accessed by a diskless workstation or PC. The term client/server has a simple meaning in TCP/IP: any device that initiates communications is the client, and the device that answers is the server. The server is responding to (serving) the client's requests.
To understand the roles of the many components of the TCP/IP protocol family, it is useful to know what you can do over a TCP/IP network. Then, once the applications are understood, the protocols that make it possible are a little easier to comprehend. The following list is not exhaustive but mentions the primary user applications that TCP/IP provides.
The Telnet program provides a remote login capability. This lets a user on one machine log onto another machine and act as though he or she were directly in front of the second machine. The connection can be anywhere on the local network or on another network anywhere in the world, as long as the user has permission to log onto the remote system.
You can use Telnet when you need to perform actions on a machine across the country. This isn't often done except in a LAN or WAN context, but a few systems accessible through the Internet allow Telnet sessions while users play around with a new application or operating system.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) enables a file on one system to be copied to another system. The user doesn't actually log in as a full user to the machine he or she wants to access, as with Telnet, but instead uses the FTP program to enable access. Again, the correct permissions are necessary to provide access to the files.
Once the connection to a remote machine has been established, FTP enables you to copy one or more files to your machine. (The term transfer implies that the file is moved from one system to another but the original is not affected. Files are copied.) FTP is a widely used service on the Internet, as well as on many large LANs and WANs.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used for transferring electronic mail. SMTP is completely transparent to the user. Behind the scenes, SMTP connects to remote machines and transfers mail messages much like FTP transfers files. Users are almost never aware of SMTP working, and few system administrators have to bother with it. SMTP is a mostly trouble-free protocol and is in very wide use.
Kerberos is a widely supported security protocol. Kerberos uses a special application called an authentication server to validate passwords and encryption schemes. Kerberos is one of the more secure encryption systems used in communications and is quite common in UNIX.
Domain Name System (DNS) enables a computer with a common name to be converted to a special network address. For example, a PC called Darkstar cannot be accessed by another machine on the same network (or any other connected network) unless some method of checking the local machine name and replacing the name with the machine's hardware address is available. DNS provides a conversion from the common local name to the unique physical address of the device's network connection.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) provides status messages and problem reports across a network to an administrator. SNMP uses User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as a transport mechanism. SNMP employs slightly different terms from TCP/IP, working with managers and agents instead of clients and servers (although they mean essentially the same thing). An agent provides information about a device, whereas a manager communicates across a network with agents.
The Internet Protocol (IP)
Yesterday I looked at the history of TCP/IP and the Internet in some detail. Today I move on to the first of the two important protocol elements of TCP/IP: the Internet Protocol, the "IP" part of TCP/IP. A good understanding of IP is necessary to continue on to TCP and UDP, because the IP is the component that handles the movement of datagrams across a network. Knowing how a datagram must be assembled and how it is moved through the networks helps you understand how the higher-level layers work with IP. For almost all protocols in the TCP/IP family, IP is the essential element that packages data and ensures that it is sent to its destination.
This chapter contains, unfortunately, even more detail on headers, protocols, and messaging than you saw in the last couple of days. This level of information is necessary in order for you to deal with understanding the applications and their interaction with IP, as well as troubleshooting the system. Although I don't go into exhaustive detail, there is enough here that you can refer back to this chapter whenever needed.
As with many of the subjects I look at in this book, don't assume that this chapter covers everything there is to know about IP. There are many books written on IP alone, going into each facet of the protocol and its functionality. Luckily, most of the details are transparent to you, and there is little advantage gained in knowing it. For that reason, I simplify the subject a little, still providing enough detail for you to see how IP works and what it does.
The Internet Protocol (IP) is a primary protocol of the OSI model, as well as an integral part of TCP/IP (as the name suggests). Although the word "Internet" appears in the protocol's name, it is not restricted to use with the Internet. It is true that all machines on the Internet can use or understand IP, but IP can also be used on dedicated networks that have no relation to the Internet at all. IP defines a protocol, not a connection. Indeed, IP is a very good choice for any network that needs an efficient protocol for machine-to-machine communications, although it faces some competition from protocols like Novell NetWare's IPX on small to medium local area networks that use NetWare as a PC server operating system.
What does IP do? Its main tasks are addressing of datagrams of information between computers and managing the fragmentation process of these datagrams. The protocol has a formal definition of the layout of a datagram of information and the formation of a header composed of information about the datagram. IP is responsible for the routing of a datagram, determining where it will be sent, and devising alternate routes in case of problems.
Another important aspect of IP's purpose has to do with unreliable delivery of a datagram. Unreliable in the IP sense means that the delivery of the datagram is not guaranteed, because it can get delayed, misrouted, or mangled in the breakdown and reassembly of message fragments. IP has nothing to do with flow control or reliability: there is no inherent capability to verify that a sent message is correctly received. IP does not have a checksum for the data contents of a datagram, only for the header information. The verification and flow control tasks are left to other components in the layer model. (For that matter, IP doesn't even properly handle the forwarding of datagrams. IP can make a guess as to the best routing to move a datagram to the next node along a path, but it does not inherently verify that the chosen path is the fastest or most efficient route.) Part of the IP system defines how gateways manage datagrams, how and when they should produce error messages, and how to recover from problems that might arise.
You saw how data can be broken into smaller sections for transmission and then reassembled at another location, a process called fragmentation and reassembly. IP provides for a maximum packet size of 65,535 bytes, which is much larger than most networks can handle, hence the need for fragmentation. IP has the capability to automatically divide a datagram of information into smaller datagrams if necessary, using the principles you saw in Day 1.
When the first datagram of a larger message that has been divided into fragments arrives at the destination, a reassembly timer is started by the receiving machine's IP layer. If all the pieces of the entire datagram are not received when the timer reaches a predetermined value, all the datagrams that have been received are discarded. The receiving machine knows the order in which the pieces are to be reassembled because of a field in the IP header. One consequence of this process is that a fragmented message has a lower chance of arrival than an unfragmented message, which is why most applications try to avoid fragmentation whenever possible.
IP is connectionless, meaning that it doesn't worry about which nodes a datagram passes through along the path, or even at which machines the datagram starts and ends. This information is in the header, but the process of analyzing and passing on a datagram has nothing to do with IP analyzing the sending and receiving IP addresses. IP handles the addressing of a datagram with the full 32-bit Internet address, even though the transport protocol addresses use 8 bits. A new version of IP, called version 6 or IPng (IP Next Generation) can handle much larger headers, as you will see toward the end of today's material in the section titled "IPng: IP Version 6."
more to come... under construction