Overview

• What is a network?
• What is an internet?
• What is the Internet?
An Introduction
• What is the World Wide Web?
to the Internet
• What is TCP/IP?
• What is a client?
Web Technology course • What is a server?
Joost van Dijk • …

• See http://whatis.com

Internet Internet
• The world’s largest computer network
• “Computers” can be PCs, mainframes, pocket PCs,
mobile phones, microwave ovens, toasters, …
• … can be based on Intel, AIX, SPARC, …
• … can run Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, …
• … can be connected by Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI,
…

• Started as research network, connecting 4 computers

• Exponential growth: See Internet Domain Survey at
www.nw.com
 Internet LAN LAN

Local Area Networks

connect nearby computers,
e.g. in an office

Example:
Ethernet

Connectivity An Internet
• A Router connects two or more physical networks
• A router is part of each network
• Traffic can move from network to network through a
router
• The router is responsible for forwarding traffic to the
right destination
 Internet Concept Surfnet4

(a) the illusion of a single

network

(b) the underlying physical

structure

Client / Server Protocol Stacks

• Server: Provider of a service
• Client: Consumer of a service
Examples:
• A Web Client a.k.a. browser (e.g. Internet Explorer)
retrieving HTML from a Web Server (e.g. Apache)
• A Mail client (e.g. Outlook) retrieving e-mail from a
Mail Server (e.g. Exchange)
• An FTP client retrieving files from an FTP server
• A telnet client connecting to a telnet server
• etc…
• A Protocol Stack is a partitioning of communication
features
• Each level solved problems on its own level of
abstraction
– Application Layer – e.g. HTTP: exchange HTML
– Transport Layer – e.g. TCP: provide Reliability
– Internet Layer – e.g. IP: connect networks
– Host to Network Layer – e.g. Ethernet: connect computers
 IP: Internet Protocol
What does IP do?
• addressing: give each machine a unique ID
• routing: glue smaller networks together to form one
huge network, and let data traverse networks one by
one
IP addressing
• An IP address is a 32 bit number
• Consists of a network number and a host number
• Host and network number have variable lengths: divide address
space into 5 classes
• Addresses assigned to hosts are either class A, B, or C.
• The prefix identifies a network, while the suffix is unique to a
host on that network.

Note that IP is connectionless and unreliable:

- data is transferred in independent units called IP
datagrams
- packets can get lost, duplicated delayed and
corrupted

IP addressing IP addressing
• IP Addresses are written using dotted decimal
notation:
• 4 groups of 8 bits
• Each group can be 0 – 255

• Example:

Note: nowadays additional techniques are used

to save IP addresses (e.g. subnetting and CIDR). See
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
 Routing Routing

http://netbook.cs.purdue.edu/anmtions/anim09_3.htm

Routing Routing

http://netbook.cs.purdue.edu/anmtions/anim09_3.htm http://netbook.cs.purdue.edu/anmtions/anim17_1.htm
 TCP: Transmission Control Protocol TCP
What does TCP do? TCP uses IP’s services to abstract from underlying
- addressing applications within a machine address networks:
using port numbers TCP sees one virtual internetwork
- provide virtual connections (although underlying TCP doesn’t know about underlying infrastructure
network layer is connectionless)
- provide reliability:
- resend lost, damaged, or delayed packets
- sort into original order
Well known port numbers:
- 80: HTTP (WWW)
- 25: SMTP (Mail)
- 21: FTP (File transfer)
- etc

TCP TCP and Client/Server

TCP uses acknowledgements to track delivery of data (called A machine can run multiple servers
segments in TCP)
(using different ports)
TCP resends a segment when an acknowledgement is not
received in time Each application uses a different application layer
protocol
Multiple clients can contact multiple servers on the
same machine
 DNS DNS
• Domain Name System
• Give computers a name that is easier to remember Example
Hierarchy:
• Map computer names to IP addresses using a
distributed database
• Computer names are organized into a hierarchy
called domains
• e.g. krypton.liacs.nl is the name for 132.229.132.11
• Example top-level domains:
– .com .edu .gov .mil .org .net
– countries: .nl .de .fr etc.
– See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm
– recently: .name .pro .museum etc.

% nslookup www.liacs.nl

DNS Server: titanium.liacs.nl

Address: 132.229.131.11

Name: enyo.liacs.nl
Address: 132.229.44.15
Aliases: www.liacs.nl

% nslookup -type=mx liacs.nl

Server: titanium.liacs.nl
Address: 132.229.131.11

liacs.nl preference = 5, mail exchanger = mailgate.wi.leidenuniv.n

liacs.nl preference = 10, mail exchanger = noc.liacs.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = zeus.wi.leidenuniv.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = apollo.liacs.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = titanium.liacs.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = rulway.leidenuniv.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = sidestreet.leidenuniv.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = noc.liacs.nl
liacs.nl nameserver = atlas.liacs.nl
mailgate.wi.leidenuniv.nl internet address = 132.229.128.1
noc.liacs.nl internet address = 132.229.44.11
…
 WWW Web Browser Internals
• The World Wide Web is a network of Hypertext
documents (not of computers)
• Hypertext is text containing hyperlinks
• A hyperlink is a pointer from a document to another
• WWW actually uses hypermedia: not restricted to text
documents
• The application layer protocol used is called HTTP

% telnet www 80

HTTP Trying 132.229.44.15...

Connected to www.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• Transfers hypertext documents written in Hypertext HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 23:52:42 GMT
Markup Language (HTML) between clients and
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) PHP/3.0.18
servers mod_perl/1.23
Last-Modified: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:44:04 GMT
• Runs on TCP port 80 ETag: "31aaf-1a2a-3bd55804"
• Scenario: Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 6698
– The client browser connects to the server Connection: close
– The client sends a request to the server Content-Type: text/html
– The server responds by sending a response
<HTML>
– The server disconnects <HEAD>
<META name="description" content="LIACS, Leiden Institute of Advanced
Computer Science, Universiteit
Leiden">
...
 HTTP Transaction SMTP
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• Sender’s Mail client connects to a mail server, and
specifies sender, recipient, email message etc.
• Client disconnects
• Mail server connects recipients mail server, forwards
message
• recipient’s mail server stores message in mailbox

• Recipient’s mail client connects to mailbox (using

Post Office Protocol) and retrieves email.

> telnet noc 25

Trying 132.229.44.11...
Connected to noc.liacs.nl.
References
Escape character is '^]'.
220 noc.liacs.nl ESMTP Sendmail 8.9.3/8.9.3/LIACS 1.0; Wed, 7 Nov
2001 14:44:45 +0100 (MET)
• The Internet Engineering Task Force: www.ietf.org
HELO liacs.nl • The World Wide Web Consortium: w3.org
250 noc.liacs.nl Hello joostd@krypton.wi.leidenuniv.nl
[132.229.132.11], pleased to meet you • Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA):
MAIL FROM: george@whitehouse.gov www.iana.org; ICANN www.icann.net
250 george@whitehouse.gov... Sender ok • Regional Registries:
RCPT TO: joostd@liacs.nl
250 joostd@liacs.nl... Recipient ok – RIPE – Europe: www.ripe.net
DATA – ARIN – USA: www.arin.net
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself – APNIC – Asia/Pacific: www.apnic.net
Hi Joost!
Wanna grab a beer after lunch? See ya!
• Naming Authorities:
GWB • Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie: www.sidn.nl
.
250 OAA11521 Message accepted for delivery
• Tools
QUIT – Visual Route: www.visualroute.nl
221 noc.liacs.nl closing connection – www.whois.org
Connection closed by foreign host.