Chapter 1. Overview of TCP/IP
When you place your computer on a network, it interacts with many other systems. The way you do network administration tasks has effects, good and bad, not only on your system but also on other systems on the network. A sound understanding of basic network administration benefits everyone.
Networking computers dramatically enhances their ability to communicate—and most computers are used more for communication than computation. Many computers are busy crunching the numbers for business and science, but the number of such systems pales in comparison to the millions of systems busy moving email to a remote colleague or retrieving information from a remote repository. When you think of the hundreds of millions of desktop systems that are used primarily for preparing documents to communicate ideas from one person to another, it is easy to see why most computers can be viewed as communications devices.
The positive impact of computer communications increases with the number and type of computers participating in the network. One of the great benefits of TCP/IP is that it provides interoperable communications between all types of hardware and all kinds of operating systems.
The name “TCP/IP” refers to an entire suite of data communications protocols. The suite gets its name from two of its protocols: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The TCP/IP protocol suite is sometimes just called IP. Both names are acceptable. TCP/IP ...
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