I wonder if this deserves it's own topic? At least it seems appropriate
to explain some of the definitions as this appears to confuse a lot of
people.
NETWORK TOPOLOGY (HARDWARE WIRING)
In essence there are three different ways to connect your machine to a
network: bus, ring and star. On a bus all devices branch of from a
single wire, like a battery powered string of Christmas lights. Ring is
similar however each node has two connectors that in turn each connect
to just one neighbour. Both these methods are no longer used for
ethernet¹. Present day networks all use a star shaped topology, but like
a snowflake it may contain branches that form a new star. Nelson's
drawing is a nice example of that.
¹) Fun fact: Ethernet is named such because its very first
implementation was in fact wireless. It was developed by the University
of Hawaii to allow computer communication between the islands. The
original protocol was unmanaged and was nicknamed `Aloha` as each node
would simply start sending information regardless of whether another
node already occupied the line, garbling the signal.
STAR NETWORK COMPONENTS
- The heart of a star network is either a hub or switch. The
difference between the two is that a hub simply repeats all data from
one incoming line to all other lines whereas a switch will only
forward the data to the line to which the target machine is connected.
An exception to this are so-called broadcast and multicast messages
which will be repeated to all lines.
- A managed switch is a special type of switch where you can configure
individual ports to allow or disallow specific data streams or assign
higher priority.
- A router is yet another type of switch that allows going from one IP
address range to another. This may be static pass through, but in many
cases it involves what is known as masquerading where the router
rewrites the package so that the receiver cannot see the original
sender but only the router.
- An access point (AP) is a hub that uses wifi radio instead of
wiring. Consumer devices usually combine this with a router function.
DEFINITIONS
- An SSID is the public name of a wifi network. A single AP may
publish multiple SSIDs, each which it's own policies (password,
encryption method, etc) attached to it.
- VLAN is a method to allow sending multiple networks over a single
wire. A poor man's solution to this is to simply use multiple IP
address ranges, but in that case multicast messages sent by one
network will also be seen by the other network(s). VLAN tagging allows
network components that are able to process it to be isolated from
other traffic (having either a different VLAN tag or no tag at all).
Machines that cannot process VLAN tags will always drop tagged
packets.
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