Appendix A. Leftovers: The Top Ten Things (we didn’t cover)

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Networking is such a huge subject, we couldn’t hope to cover everything in just one book.

But before we turn you loose on the world, we want to add a few more things to your toolbox. Some of these things are in all the network books, so we thought we could squeeze them in here. Some of these things are higher level, and we want you to at least be familiar with the terminology and basic concepts. So before you put the book down, take a read through these tidbits.

#1 Network topologies

The topology of a network is the logical structure of the connections in a network. Here are three topologies you might encounter.

Star topology

When we talked about designing and wiring networks, we assumed that we were working with an Ethernet switch or hub in the middle. The topology or shape of this network is called a star. A star is called that because all the network clients talk to the hub or switch in the middle.

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Bus topology

Another topology is the bus. An Ethernet network using coax uses a bus topology. All the network nodes are connected to a shared cable, so there is no central device. Each node on the network deals with all the traffic.

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