Steven Speaks Tech episode 1 - Networking 101

Hello everyone,

I'm Steven aka @sinlg. I am testing this out to see if there are any interests for folks to learn about techie stuffs. Whether basic concepts of detailed zoom-in into the realm of digital electronics or craziness of quantum computers.

Today we'll talk about networking in terms of computers. How does a computer communicate with other computers and perhaps just rub on the surface. And then we can guage how much people want to learn about the topic.

First off, terminnology

LAN - Local Area Network
WAN - Wide Area Network
DNS - Domain Name Server
DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
NAT - Network Address Translation
IP - Internet Protocol
IPv4 - Internet Protocol version 4
IPv6 - Internet Protocol version 6
ISP - Internet Service Provider
Ethernet - the de facto connection medium to create a LAN.
Wi-Fi - Wireless network (802.11 (a/b/g/n/ac/ax))

A typical setup of a home network is shown above.

You ISP provides you with a modem (example : DSL, Cable or fibre optics)... the output is generally a LAN(ethernet RJ45 port) that connects to a router (if the modem doesnt have a built-in router).

The router has something built-in called DHCP. DHCP basical assigns an (local) IP address to a device that is connected to your home network.

For example, The router's address consist of the internal address (eg. 192.168.1.1) and also an external address given by the ISP (eg. 17.172.224.47)

when the router sees the switch, it will assign an IP to the switch (eg. 192.168.1.2) and when it see the wifi Access Point, it gives it (192.168.1.3)

The laptop gets 192.168.1.4 , the phone gets 192.168.1.5 and the printer gets 192.168.1.6

The order which is given out depends on the sequence the devices connects and negoiate with the DHCP to get the address. There are of course ways you can fix an adress for a particular device or even blacklist certain devices from getting onto your network.

You can think of a switch is like a router without the DHCP. You know when you need more power socket from your wall socket, you can just buy a simple splitter that splits the one socket to many? Internally, the circuit is just splitting the live, neutral and earth cables to separate sockets. For networking, you cannot simply split the cables to addional ports, you need a Switch to join the cables together.

wikipedia says

A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, officially MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive, and forward data to the destination device.

I can go on and one.. but I think this first intro to networking will suffice for now, just to get an idea of whether people want to learn more on such subject matters.

Leave a comment of what you think, what topics you'd like to see, how much depth do you want etc.

Cheers for now... until Steven speaks tech again !