How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know by Brian Ward

Author:Brian Ward [Ward, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: COMPUTERS / Operating Systems / Linux
ISBN: 9781593276454
Publisher: No Starch Press, Inc.
Published: 2014-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Note

You might have heard of another set of layers known as the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model. This is a seven-layer network model often used in teaching and designing networks, but we won’t cover the OSI model because you’ll be working directly with the four layers described here. To learn a lot more about layers (and networks in general), see Andrew S. Tanenbaum and David J. Wetherall’s Computer Networks, 5th edition (Prentice Hall, 2010).

9.3 The Internet Layer

Rather than start at the very bottom of the network stack with the physical layer, we’ll start at the network layer because it can be easier to understand. The Internet as we currently know it is based on the Internet Protocol, version 4 (IPv4), though version 6 (IPv6) is gaining adoption. One of the most important aspects of the Internet layer is that it’s meant to be a software network that places no particular requirements on hardware or operating systems. The idea is that you can send and receive Internet packets over any kind of hardware, using any operating system.

The Internet’s topology is decentralized; it’s made up of smaller networks called subnets. The idea is that all subnets are interconnected in some way. For example, in Figure 9-1, the LAN is normally a single subnet.

A host can be attached to more than one subnet. As you saw in 9.1 Network Basics, that kind of host is called a router if it can transmit data from one subnet to another (another term for router is gateway). Figure 9-2 refines Figure 9-1 by identifying the LAN as a subnet, as well as Internet addresses for each host and the router. The router in the figure has two addresses, the local subnet 10.23.2.1 and the link to the Internet (but this Internet link’s address is not important right now so it’s just marked “Uplink Address”). We’ll look first at the addresses and then the subnet notation.

Each Internet host has at least one numeric IP address in the form of a.b.c.d, such as 10.23.2.37. An address in this notation is called a dotted-quad sequence. If a host is connected to multiple subnets, it has at least one IP address per subnet. Each host’s IP address should be unique across the entire Internet, but as you’ll see later, private networks and NAT can make this a little confusing.

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