Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Networking, Fourth Edition

Chapter 4. Building the Network Infrastructure

In this chapter

• Understanding network architectures

• Working with Ethernet

• Understanding the IEEE standards for networking

• Becoming familiar with IBM Token-Ring

• Choosing a network connectivity strategy

Now that we’ve sorted out the differences between peer-to-peer networks and server-based networks and looked at some of the hardware considerations for network clients and servers, we can concentrate on issues related to actually setting up a network’s infrastructure. The word infrastructure is probably one of those words that is both overused and misused by network administrators. For example, when something goes wrong on the network, it is very convenient to tell management that there is “an infrastructure ...