Network Basics

Networks and networking have grown exponentially over the last 20 years—understandably so. They’ve had to evolve at light speed just to keep up with huge increases in basic mission-critical user needs ranging from sharing data and printers to more advanced demands like videoconferencing. Unless everyone who needs to share network resources is located in the same office area (an increasingly uncommon situation), the challenge is to connect the sometimes large number of relevant networks together so all users can share the networks’ wealth.

Let’s take a look at how communication happens on a basic local area network (LAN), which I started to discuss in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Networks.” Starting with Figure 4.1, you get a picture of a basic LAN network that’s connected together using an Ethernet connection to a hub. This network is actually one collision domain and one broadcast domain, but don’t stress if you have...