Chapter 9. Understanding your Network and its Configuration

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Networking is the practice of connecting computers and sending data between them. That sounds simple enough, but to understand how it works, you need to ask two fundamental questions:

  • How does the computer sending the data know where to send its data?

  • When the destination computer receives the data, how does it know what it just received?

A computer answers these questions by using a series of components, with each one responsible for a certain aspect of sending, receiving, and identifying data. The components are arranged in groups that form network layers, which stack on top of each other ...

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