Of course, we have come a long way from the primitive pursuits and devices of our forebears. Nowadays, we have computers talk to each other over vast assemblages of wires, fiber optics, microwaves, and the like, to make an appointment for Saturday's soccer match.[5] In the following description, we will deal with the means and ways by which this is accomplished, but leave out the wires, as well as the soccer part.
We will describe three types of networks in this guide. We will focus on TCP/IP most heavily because it is the most popular protocol suite in use on both Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs), such as the Internet. We will also take a look at UUCP and IPX. UUCP was once commonly used to transport news and mail messages over dialup telephone connections. It is less common today, but is still useful in a variety of situations. The IPX protocol is used most commonly in the Novell NetWare environment and we'll describe how to use it to connect your Linux machine into a Novell network. Each of these protocols are networking protocols and are used to carry data between host computers. We'll discuss how they are used and introduce you to their underlying principles.
We define a network as a collection of hosts that are able to communicate with each other, often by relying on the services of a number of dedicated hosts that relay data between the participants. Hosts are often computers, but need not be; one can also think of X terminals or intelligent printers as hosts. Small agglomerations of hosts are also called sites.
Communication is impossible without some sort of language or code. In computer networks, these languages are collectively referred to as protocols. However, you shouldn't think of written protocols here, but rather of the highly formalized code of behavior observed when heads of state meet, for instance. In a very similar fashion, the protocols used in computer networks are nothing but very strict rules for the exchange of messages between two or more hosts.
TCP/IP Networks
Modern networking applications require a sophisticated approach to carrying data from one machine to another. If you are managing a Linux machine that has many users, each of whom may wish to simultaneously connect to remote hosts on a network, you need a way of allowing them to share your network connection without interfering with each other. The approach that a large number of modern networking protocols uses is called packet-switching. A packet is a small chunk of data that is transferred from one machine to another across the network. The switching occurs as the datagram is carried across each link in the network. A packet-switched network shares a single network link among many users by alternately sending packets from one user to another across that link.
The solution that Unix systems, and subsequently many non-Unix systems, have adopted is known as TCP/IP. When talking about TCP/IP networks you will hear the term datagram, which technically has a special meaning but is often used interchangeably with packet. In this section, we will have a look at underlying concepts of the TCP/IP protocols.
Introduction to TCP/IP Networks
TCP/IP traces its origins to a research project funded by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1969. The ARPANET was an experimental network that was converted into an operational one in 1975 after it had proven to be a success.
In 1983, the new protocol suite TCP/IP was adopted as a standard, and all hosts on the network were required to use it. When ARPANET finally grew into the Internet (with ARPANET itself passing out of existence in 1990), the use of TCP/IP had spread to networks beyond the Internet itself. Many companies have now built corporate TCP/IP networks, and the Internet has grown to a point at which it could almost be considered a mainstream consumer technology. It is difficult to read a newspaper or magazine now without seeing reference to the Internet; almost everyone can now use it.
For something concrete to look at as we discuss TCP/IP throughout the following sections, we will consider Groucho Marx University (GMU), situated somewhere in Fredland, as an example. Most departments run their own Local Area Networks, while some share one and others run several of them. They are all interconnected and hooked to the Internet through a single high-speed link.
Suppose your Linux box is connected to a LAN of Unix hosts at the Mathematics department, and its name is erdos. To access a host at the Physics department, say quark, you enter the following command:
$ rlogin quark.physics
Welcome to the Physics Department at GMU
(ttyq2) login:
At the prompt, you enter your login name, say andres, and your password. You are then given a shell[6] on quark, to which you can type as if you were sitting at the system's console. After you exit the shell, you are returned to your own machine's prompt. You have just used one of the instantaneous, interactive applications that TCP/IP provides: remote login.
While being logged into quark, you might also want to run a graphical user interface application, like a word processing program, a graphics drawing program, or even a World Wide Web browser. The X windows system is a fully network-aware graphical user environment, and it is available for many different computing systems. To tell this application that you want to have its windows displayed on your host's screen, you have to set the DISPLAY environment variable:
$ DISPLAY=erdos.maths:0.0
$ export DISPLAY
If you now start your application, it will contact your X server instead of quark's, and display all its windows on your screen. Of course, this requires that you have X11 runnning on erdos. The point here is that TCP/IP allows quark and erdos to send X11 packets back and forth to give you the illusion that you're on a single system. The network is almost transparent here.
Another very important application in TCP/IP networks is NFS, which stands for Network File System. It is another form of making the network transparent, because it basically allows you to treat directory hierarchies from other hosts as if they were local file systems and look like any other directories on your host. For example, all users' home directories can be kept on a central server machine from which all other hosts on the LAN mount them. The effect is that users can log in to any machine and find themselves in the same home directory. Similarly, it is possible to share large amounts of data (such as a database, documentation or application programs) among many hosts by maintaining one copy of the data on a server and allowing other hosts to access it. We will come back to NFS in Chapter 14, The Network File System.
Of course, these are only examples of what you can do with TCP/IP networks. The possibilities are almost limitless, and we'll introduce you to more as you read on through the book.
6
The shell is a command-line interface to the Unix operating system. It's similar to the DOS prompt in a Microsoft Windows environment, albeit much more powerful.