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| HowTo Linux Zone | Linux Zone Home | E-Mail Me | The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO by Eric S. Raymond
v1.1, 3 December 1998
This document describes the working basics of PC-class computers,
Unix-like operating systems, and the Internet in non-technical lan­
guage.
______________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose of this document
1.2 Related resources
1.3 New versions of this document
1.4 Feedback and corrections
2. Basic anatomy of your computer
3. What happens when you switch on a computer?
4. What happens when you run programs from the shell?
5. How do input devices and interrupts work?
6. How does my computer do several things at once?
7. How does my computer keep processes from stepping on each other?
8. How does my computer store things on disk?
8.1 Low-level disk and file system structure
8.2 File names and directories
8.3 Mount points
8.4 How a file gets looked up
8.5 How things can go wrong
9. How do computer languages work?
9.1 Compiled languages
9.2 Interpreted languages
9.3 P-code languages
10. How does the Internet work?
10.1 Names and locations
10.2 Packets and routers
10.3 TCP and IP
10.4 HTTP, an application protocol
______________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
1.1. Purpose of this document
This document is intended to help Linux and Internet users who are
learning by doing. While this is a great way to acquire skills,
sometimes it leaves peculiar gaps in one's knowledge of the basics --
gaps which can make it hard to think creatively or troubleshoot
effectively, from lack of a clear mental model of what is really going
on.
I'll try to describe in clear, simple language how it all works. The
presentation will be tuned for people using Unix or Linux on PC-class
hardware. Nevertheless I'll usually refer simply to `Unix' here, as
most of what I will describe is constant across platforms and across
Unix variants.
I'm going to assume you're using an Intel PC. The details differ
slightly if you're running an Alpha or PowerPC or some other Unix box,
but the basic concepts are the same.
I won't repeat things, so you'll have to pay attention, but that also
means you'll learn from every word you read. It's a good idea to just
skim when you first read this; you should come back and reread it a
few times after you've digested what you have learned.
This is an evolving document. I intend to keep adding sections in
response to user feedback, so you should come back and review it
periodically.
1.2. Related resources
If you're reading this in order to learn how to hack, you should also
read the How To Become A Hacker FAQ
<http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>. It has links to
some other useful resources.
1.3. New versions of this document
New versions of the Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO will be
periodically posted to comp.os.linux.help and and news.answers
<news:answers>. They will also be uploaded to various Linux WWW and
FTP sites, including the LDP home page.
You can view the latest version of this on the World Wide Web via the
URL <http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Fundamentals-HOWTO.html>.
1.4. Feedback and corrections
If you have questions or comments about this document, please feel
free to mail Eric S. Raymond, at esr@thyrsus.com. I welcome any
suggestions or criticisms. I especially welcome hyperlinks to more
detailed explanations of individual concepts. If you find a mistake
with this document, please let me know so I can correct it in the next
version. Thanks.
2. Basic anatomy of your computer
Your computer has a processor chip inside it that does the actual
computing. It has internal memory (what DOS/Windows people call
``RAM'' and Unix people often call ``core''). The processor and
memory live on the motherboard which is the heart of your computer.
Your computer has a screen and keyboard. It has hard drives and
floppy disks. The screen and your disks have controller cards that
plug into the motherboard and help the computer drive these outboard
devices. (Your keyboard is too simple to need a separate card; the
controller is built into the keyboard chassis itself.)
We'll go into some of the details of how these devices work later.
For now, here are a few basic things to keep in mind about how they
work together:
All the inboard parts of your computer are connected by a bus.
Physically, the bus is what you plug your controller cards into (the
video card, the disk controller, a sound card if you have one). The
bus is the data highway between your processor, your screen, your
disk, and everything else.
The processor, which makes everything else go, can't actually see any
of the other pieces directly; it has to talk to them over the bus.
The only other subsystem it has really fast, immediate access to is
memory (the core). In order for programs to run, then, they have to
be in core.
When your computer reads a program or data off the disk, what actually
happens is that the processor uses the bus to send a disk read request
to your disk controller. Some time later the disk controller uses the
bus to signal the computer that it has read the data and put it in a
certain location in core. The processor can then use the bus to look
at that memory.
Your keyboard and screen also communicate with the processor via the
bus, but in simpler ways. We'll discuss those later on. For now, you
know enough to understand what happens when you turn on your computer.
3. What happens when you switch on a computer?
A computer without a program running is just an inert hunk of
electronics. The first thing a computer has to do when it is turned
on is start up a special program called an operating system. The
operating system's job is to help other computer programs to work by
handling the messy details of controlling the computer's hardware.
The process of bringing up the operating system is called booting
(originally this was bootstrapping and alluded to the difficulty of
pulling yourself up ``by your bootstraps''). Your computer knows how
to boot because instructions for booting are built into one of its
chips, the BIOS (or Basic Input/Output System) chip.
The BIOS chip tells it to look in a fixed place on the lowest-numbered
hard disk (the boot disk) for a special program called a boot loader
(under Linux the boot loader is called LILO). The boot loader is
pulled into core and started. The boot loader's job is to start the
real operating system.
The loader does this by looking for a kernel, loading it into core,
and starting it. When you boot Linux and see "LILO" on the screen
followed by a bunch of dots, it is loading the kernel. (Each dot
means it has loaded another disk block of kernel code.)
(You may wonder why the BIOS doesn't load the kernel directly -- why
the two-step process with the boot loader? Well, the BIOS isn't very
smart. In fact it's very stupid, and Linux doesn't use it at all
after boot time. It was originally written for primitive 8-bit PCs
with tiny disks, and literally can't access enough of the disk to load
the kernel directly. The boot loader step also lets you start one of
several operating systems off different places on your disk, in the
unlikely event that Unix isn't good enough for you.)
Once the kernel starts, it has to look around, find the rest of the
hardware, and get ready to run programs. It does this by poking not
at ordinary memory locations but rather at I/O ports -- special bus
addresses that are likely to have device controller cards listening at
them for commands. The kernel doesn't poke at random; it has a lot of
built-in knowledge about what it's likely to find where, and how
controllers will respond if they're present. This process is called
autoprobing.
Most of the messages you see at boot time are the kernel autoprobing
your hardware through the I/O ports, figuring out what it has
available to it and adapting itself to your machine. The Linux kernel
is extremely good at this, better than most other Unixes and much
better than DOS or Windows. In fact, many Linux old-timers think the
cleverness of Linux's boot-time probes (which made it relatively easy
to install) was a major reason it broke out of the pack of free-Unix
experiments to attract a critical mass of users.
But getting the kernel fully loaded and running isn't the end of the
boot process; it's just the first stage (sometimes called run level
1).
The kernel's next step is to check to make sure your disks are OK.
Disk file systems are fragile things; if they've been damaged by a
hardware failure or a sudden power outage, there are good reasons to
take recovery steps before your Unix is all the way up. We'll go into
some of this later on when we talk about ``how file systems can go
wrong''.
The kernel's next step is to start several daemons. A daemon is a
program like a print spooler, a mail listener or a WWW server that
lurks in the background, waiting for things to do. These special
programs often have to coordinate several requests that could
conflict. They are daemons because it's often easier to write one
program that runs constantly and knows about all requests than it
would be to try to make sure that a flock of copies (each processing
one request and all running at the same time) don't step on each
other. The particular collection of daemons your system starts may
vary, but will almost always include a print spooler (a gatekeeper
daemon for your printer).
Once all daemons are started, we're at run level 2. The next step is
to prepare for users. The kernel starts a copy of a program called
getty to watch your console (and maybe more copies to watch dial-in
serial ports). This program is what issues the login prompt to your
console. We're now at run level 3 and ready for you to log in and run
programs.
When you log in (give a name and password) you identify yourself to
getty and the computer. It then runs a program called (naturally
enough) login, which does some housekeeping things and then starts up
a command interpreter, the shell. (Yes, getty and login could be one
program. They're separate for historical reasons not worth going into
here.)
In the next section, we'll talk about what happens when you run
programs from the shell.
4. What happens when you run programs from the shell?
The normal shell gives you the '$' prompt that you see after logging
in (unless you've customized it to something else). We won't talk
about shell syntax and the easy things you can see on the screen here;
instead we'll take a look behind the scenes at what's happening from
the computer's point of view.
After boot time and before you run a program, you can think of your
computer of containing a zoo of processes that are all waiting for
something to do. They're all waiting on events. An event can be you
pressing a key or moving a mouse. Or, if your machine is hooked to a
network, an event can be a data packet coming in over that network.
The kernel is one of these processes. It's s special one, because it
controls when the other user processes can run, and it is normally the
only process with direct access to the machine's hardware. In fact,
user processes have to make requests to the kernel when they want to
get keyboard input, write to your screen, read from or write to disk,
or do just about anything other than crunching bits in memory. These
requests are known as system calls.
Normally all I/O goes through the kernel so it can schedule the
operations and prevent processes from stepping on each other. A few
special user processes are allowed to slide around the kernel, usually
by being given direct access to I/O ports. X servers (the programs
that handle other programs' requests to do screen graphics on most
Unix boxes) are the most common example of this. But we haven't
gotten to an X server yet; you're looking at a shell prompt on a
character console.
The shell is just a user process, and not a particularly special one.
It waits on your keystrokes, listening (through the kernel) to the
keyboard I/O port. As the kernel sees them, it echos them to your
screen then passes them to the shell. When the kernel sees an `Enter'
it passes your line of text to the shell. The shell tries to interpret
those keystrokes as commands.
Let's say you type `ls' and Enter to invoke the Unix directory lister.
The shell applies its built-in rules to figure out that you want to
run the executable command in the file `/bin/ls'. It makes a system
call asking the kernel to start /bin/ls as a new child process and
give it access to the screen and keyboard through the kernel. Then
the shell goes to sleep, waiting for ls to finish.
When /bin/ls is done, it tells the kernel it's finished by issuing an
exit system call. The kernel then wakes up the shell and tells it it
can continue running. The shell issues another prompt and waits for
another line of input.
Other things may be going on while your `ls' is executing, however
(we'll have to suppose that you're listing a very long directory).
You might switch to another virtual console, log in there, and start a
game of Quake, for example. Or, suppose you're hooked up to the
Internet. Your machine might be sending or receiving mail while
/bin/ls runs.
5. How do input devices and interrupts work?
Your keyboard is a very simple input device; simple because it
generates small amounts of data very slowly (by a computer's
standards). When you press or release a key, that event is signalled
up the keyboard cable to raise a hardware interrupt.
It's the operating system's job to watch for such interrupts. For
each possible kind of interrupt, there will be an interrupt handler, a
part of the operating system that stashes away any data associated
with them (like your keypress/keyrelease value) until it can be
processed.
What the interrupt handler for your keyboard actually does is post the
key value into a system area near the bottom of core. There, it will
be available for inspection when the operating system passes control
to whichever program is currently supposed to be reading from the
keyboard.
More complex input devices like disk or network cards work in a
similar way. Above, we referred to a disk controller using the bus to
signal that a disk request has been fulfilled. What actually happens
is that the disk raises an interrupt. The disk interrupt handler then
copies the retrieved data into memory, for later use by the program
that made the request.
Every kind of interrupts has an associated priority level. Lower-
priority interrupts (like keyboard events) have to wait on higher-
priority interrupts (like clock ticks or disk events). Unix is
designed to give high priority to the kinds of events that need to be
processed rapidly in order to keep the machine's response smooth.
In your OS's boot-time messages, you may see references to IRQ
numbers. You may be aware that one of the common ways to misconfigure
hardware is to have two different devices try to use the same IRQ,
without understanding exactly why.
Here's the answer. IRQ is short for "Interrupt Request". The
operating system needs to know at startup time which numbered
interrupts each hardware device will use, so it can associate the
proper handlers with each one. If two different devices try use the
same IRQ, interrupts will sometimes get dispatched to the wrong
handler. This will usually at least lock up the device, and can
sometimes confuse the OS badly enough that it will flake out or crash.
6. How does my computer do several things at once?
It doesn't, actually. Computers can only do one task (or process) at
a time. But a computer can change tasks very rapidly, and fool slow
human beings into thinking it's doing several things at once. This is
called timesharing.
One of the kernel's jobs is to manage timesharing. It has a part
called the scheduler which keeps information inside itself about all
the other (non-kernel) processes in your zoo. Every 1/60th of a
second, a timer goes off in the kernel, generating a clock interrupt.
The scheduler stops whatever process is currently running, suspends it
in place, and hands control to another process.
1/60th of a second may not sound like a lot of time. But on today's
microprocessors it's enough to run tens of thousands of machine
instructions, which can do a great deal of work. So even if you have
many proceses, each one can accomplish quite a bit in each of its
timeslices.
In practice, a program may not get its entire timeslice. If an
interrupt comes in from an I/O device, the kernel effectively stops
the current task, runs the interrupt handler, and then returns to the
current task. A storm of high-priority interrupts can squeeze out
normal processing; this misbehavior is called thrashing and is
fortunately very hard to induce under modern Unixes.
In fact, the speed of programs is only very seldom limited by the
amount of machine time they can get (there are a few exceptions to
this rule, such as sound or 3-D graphics generation). Much more
often, delays are caused when the program has to wait on data from a
disk drive or network connection.
An operating system that can routinely support many simultaneous
processes is called "multitasking". The Unix family of operating
systems was designed from the ground up for multitasking and is very
good at it -- much more effective than Windows or the Mac OS, which
have had multitasking bolted into it as an afterthought and do it
rather poorly. Efficient, reliable multitasking is a large part of
what makes Linux superior for networking, communications, and Web
service.
7. How does my computer keep processes from stepping on each other?
The kernel's scheduler takes care of dividing processes in time. Your
operating system also has to divide them in space, so that processes
don't step on each others' working memory. The things your operating
system does to solve this problem are called memory management.
Each process in your zoo needs its own area of core memory, as a place
to run its code from and keep variables and results in. You can think
of this set as consisting of a read-only code segment (containing the
process's instructions) and a writeable data segment (containing all
the process's variable storage). The data segment is truly unique to
each process, but if two processes are running the same code Unix
automatically arranges for them to share a single code segment as an
efficiency measure.
Efficiency is important, because core memory is expensive. Sometimes
you don't have enough to hold the entirety of all the programs the
machine is running, especially if you are using a large program like
an X server. To get around this, Unix uses a strategy called virtual
memory. It doesn't try to hold all the code and data for a process in
core. Instead, it keeps around only a relatively small working set;
the rest of the process's state is left in a special swap space area
on your hard disk.
As the process runs, Unix tries to anticipate how the working set will
change and have only the pieces that are needed in core. Doing this
effectively is both complicated and tricky, so I won't try and
describe it all here -- but it depends on the fact that code and data
references tend to happen in clusters, with each new one likely to
refer to somewhere close to an old one. So if Unix keeps around the
code or data most frequently (or most recently) used, you will usually
succeed in saving time.
Note that in the past, that "Sometimes" two paragraphs ago was "Almost
always," -- the size of core was typically small relative to the size
of running programs, so swapping was frequent. Memory is far less
expensive nowadays and even low-end machines have quite a lot of it.
On modern single-user machines with 64MB of core and up, it's possible
to run X and a typical mix of jobs without ever swapping.
Even in this happy situation, the part of the operating system called
the memory manager still has important work to do. It has to make
sure that programs can only alter their own data segments -- that is,
prevent erroneous or malicious code in one program from garbaging the
data in another. To do this, it keeps a table of data and code
segments. The table is updated whenever a process either requests
more memory or releases memory (the latter usually when it exits).
This table is used to pass commands to a specialized part of the
underlying hardware called an MMU or memory management unit. Modern
processor chips have MMUs built right onto them. The MMU has the
special ability to put fences around areas of memory, so an out-of-
bound reference will be refused and cause a special interrupt to be
raised.
If you ever see a Unix message that says "Segmentation fault", "core
dumped" or something similar, this is exactly what has happened; an
attempt by the running program to access memory outside its segment
has raised a fatal interrupt. This indicates a bug in the program
code; the core dump it leaves behind is diagnostic information
intended to help a programmer track it down.
8. How does my computer store things on disk?
When you look at a hard disk under Unix, you see a tree of named
directories and files. Normally you won't need to look any deeper
than that, but it does become useful to know what's going on
underneath if you have a disk crash and need to try to salvage files.
Unfortunately, there's no good way to describe disk organization from
the file level downwards, so I'll have to describe it from the
hardware up.
8.1. Low-level disk and file system structure
The surface area of your disk, where it stores data, is divided up
something like a dartboard -- into circular tracks which are then pie-
sliced into sectors. Because tracks near the outer edge have more
area than those close to the spindle at the center of the disk, the
outer tracks have more sector slices in them than the inner ones.
Each sector (or disk block) has the same size, which under modern
Unixes is generally 1 binary K (1024 8-bit words). Each disk block
has a unique address or disk block number.
Unix divides the disk into disk partitions. Each partition is a
continuous span of blocks that's used separately from any other
partition, either as a file system or as swap space. The lowest-
numbered partition is often treated specially, as a boot partition
where you can put a kernel to be booted.
Each partition is either swap space (used to implement ``virtual
memory'' or a file system used to hold files. Swap-space partitions
are just treated as a linear sequence of blocks. File systems, on the
other hand, need a way to map file names to sequences of disk blocks.
Because files grow, shrink, and change over time, a file's data blocks
will not be a linear sequence but may be scattered all over its
partition (from wherever the operating system can find a free block
when it needs one).
8.2. File names and directories
Within each file system, the mapping from names to blocks is handled
through a structure called an i-node. There's a pool of these things
near the ``bottom'' (lowest-numbered blocks) of each file system (the
very lowest ones are used for housekeeping and labeling purposes we
won't describe here). Each i-node describes one file. File data
blocks live above the inodes.
Every i-node contains a list of the disk block numbers in the file it
describes. (Actually this is a half-truth, only correct for small
files, but the rest of the details aren't important here.) Note that
the i-node does not contain the name of the file.
Names of files live in directory structures. A directory structure
just maps names to i-node numbers. This is why, in Unix, a file can
have multiple true names (or hard links); they're just multiple
directory entries that happen to point to the same inode.
8.3. Mount points
In the simplest case, your entire Unix file system lives in just one
disk partition. While you'll see this arrangement on some small
personal Unix systems, it's unusual. More typical is for it to be
spread across several disk partitions, possibly on different physical
disks. So, for example, your system may one small partition where
the kernel lives, a slightly larger one where OS utilities live, and a
much bigger one where user home directories live.
The only partition you'll have access to immediately after system boot
is your root partition, which is (almost always) the one you booted
from. It holds the root directory of the file system, the top node
from which everything else hangs.
The other partitions in the system have to be attached to this root in
order for your entire, multiple-partition file system to be
accessible. About midway through the boot process, your Unix will
make these non-root partitions accessible. It will mount each one
onto a directory on the root partition.
For example, if you have a Unix directory called `/usr', it is
probably a mount point to a partition that contains many programs
installed with your Unix but not required during initial boot.
8.4. How a file gets looked up
Now we can look at the file system from the top down. When you open a
file (such as, say, /home/esr/WWW/ldp/fundamentals.sgml) here is what
happens:
Your kernel starts at the root of your Unix file system (in the root
partition). It looks for a directory there called `home'. Usually
`home' is a mount point to a large user partition elsewhere, so it
will go there. In the top-level directory structure of that user
partition, it will look for a entry called `esr' and extract an inode
number. It will go to that i-node, notice it is a directory
structure, and look up `WWW'. Extracting that i-node, it will go to
the corresponding subdirectory and look up `ldp'. That will take it
to yet another directory inode. Opening that one, it will find an i-
node number for `fundamentals.sgml'. That inode is not a directory,
but instead holds the list of disk blocks associated with the file.
8.5. How things can go wrong
Earlier we hinted that file systems can be fragile things. Now we
know that to get to file you have to hopscotch through what may be an
arbitrarily long chain of directory and i-node references. Now
suppose your hard disk develops a bad spot?
If you're lucky, it will only trash some file data. If you're
unlucky, it could corrupt a directory structure or i-node number and
leave an entire subtree of your system hanging in limbo -- or, worse,
result in a corrupted structure that points multiple ways at the same
disk block or inode. Such corruption can be spread by normal file
operations, trashing data that was bot in the original bad spot.
Fortunately, this kind of contingency has become quite uncommon as
disk hardware has become more reliable. Still, it means that your
Unix will want to integrity-check the file system periodically to make
sure nothing is amiss. Modern Unixes do a fast integrity check on
each partition at boot time, just before mounting it. Every few
reboots they'll do a much more thorough check that takes a few minutes
longer.
If all of this sounds like Unix is terribly complex and failure-prone,
it may be reassuring to know that these boot-time checks typically
catch and correct normal problems before they become really
disasterous. Other operating systems don't have these facilities,
which speeds up booting a bit but can leave you much more seriously
screwed when attempting to recover by hand (and that's assuming you
have a copy of Norton Utilities or whatever in the first place...).
9. How do computer languages work?
We've already discussed ``how programs are run''. Every program
ultimately has to execute as a stream of bytes that are instructions
in your computer's machine language. But human beings don't deal with
machine language very well; doing so has become a rare, black art even
among hackers.
Almost all Unix code except a small amount of direct hardware-
interface support in the kernel itself is nowadays written in a high-
level language. (The `high-level' in this term is a historical relic
meant to distinguish these from `low-level' assembler languages, which
are basically thin wrappers around machine code.)
There are several different kinds of high-level languages. In order
to talk about these, you'll find it useful to bear in mind that the
source code of a program (the human-created, editable version) has to
go through some kind of translation into machine code that the machine
can actually run.
9.1. Compiled languages
The most conventional kind of language is a compiled language.
Compiled languages get translated into runnable files of binary
machine code by a special program called (logically enough) a
compiler. Once the binary has been generated, you can run it directly
without looking at the source code again. (Most software is delivered
as compiled binaries made from code you don't see.)
Compiled languages tend to give excellent performance and have the
most complete access to the OS, but also to be difficult to program
in.
C, the language in which Unix itself is written, is by far the most
important of these (with its variant C++). FORTRAN is another
compiled language still used among engineers and scientists but years
older and much more primitive. In the Unix world no other compiled
languages are in mainstream use. Outide it, COBOL is very widely used
for financial and business software.
There used to be many other compiler languages, but most of them have
either gone extinct or are strictly research tools. If you are a new
Unix developer using a compiled language, it is overwhelmingly likely
to be C or C++.
9.2. Interpreted languages
An interpreted language depends on an interpreter program that reads
the source code and translates it on the fly into computations and
system calls. The source has to be re-interpreted (and the
interpreter present) each time the code is executed.
Interpreted languages tend to be slower than compiled languages, and
often have limited access to the underlying operating system and
hardware. On the other hand, they tend to be easier to program and
more forgiving of coding errors than compiled languages.
Many Unix utilities, including the shell and bc(1) and sed(1) and
awk(1), are effectively small interpreted languages. BASICs are
usually interpreted. So is Tcl. Historically, the most important
interpretive language has been LISP (a major improvement over most of
its successors). Today Perl is very widely used and steadily growing
more popular.
9.3. P-code languages
Since 1990 a kind of hybrid language that uses both compilation and
interpretation has become increasingly important. P-code languages
are like compiled languages in that the source is translated to a
compact binary form which is what you actually execute, but that form
is not machine code. Instead it's pseudocode (or p-code), which is
usually a lot simpler but more powerful than a real machine language.
When you run the program, you interpret the p-code.
P-code can can run nearly as fast as a compiled binary (p-code
interpreters can be made quite simple, small and speedy). But p-code
languages can keep the flexibility and power of a good interpreter.
Important p-code languages include Python and Java.
10. How does the Internet work?
To help you understand how the Internet works, we'll look at the
things that happen when you do a typical Internet operation --
pointing a browser at the front page of this document at its home on
the Web at the Linux Documentation Project. This document is
http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Fundamentals.html
which means it lives in the file LDP/HOWTO/Fundamentals.html under the
World Wide Web export directory of the host sunsite.unc.edu.
10.1. Names and locations
The first thing your browser has to do is to establish a network
connection to the machine where the document lives. To do that, it
first has to find the network location of the host sunsite.unc.edu
(`host' is short for `host machine' or `network host'; sunsite.unc.edu
is a typical hostname). The corresponding location is actually a
number called an IP address (we'll explain the `IP' part of this term
later).
To do this, your browser queries a program called a name server. The
name server may live on your machine, but it's more likely to run on a
service machine that yours talks to. When you sign up with an ISP,
part of your setup procedure will almost certainly involve telling
your Internet software the IP address of a nameserver on the ISP's
network.
The name servers on different machines talk to each other, exchanging
and keeping up to date all the information needed to resolve hostnames
(map them to IP addresses). Your nameserver may query three or four
different sites across the network in the process of resolving
sunsite.unc.edu, but this usually happens very quickly (as in less
than a second).
The nameserver will tell your browser that Sunsite's IP address is
152.2.22.81; knowing this, your machine will be able to exchange bits
with sunsite directly.
10.2. Packets and routers
What the browser wants to do is send a command to the Web server on
Sunsite that looks like this:
GET /LDP/HOWTO/Fundamentals.html HTTP/1.0
Here's how that happens. The command is made into a packet, a block
of bits like a telegram that is wrapped with three important things;
the source address (the IP address of your machine), the destination
address (152.2.22.81), and a service number or port number (80, in
this case) that indicates that it's a World Wide Web request.
Your machine then ships the packet down the wire (modem connection to
your ISP, or local network) until it gets to a specialized machine
called a router. The router has a map of the Internet in its memory
-- not always a complete one, but one that completely describes your
network neighborhood and knows how to get to the routers for other
neighborhoods on the Internet.
Your packet may pass through several routers on the way to its
destination. Routers are smart. They watch how long it takes for
other routers to acknowledge having received a packet. They use that
information to direct traffic over fast links. They use it to notice
when another routers (or a cable) have dropped off the network, and
compensate if possible by finding another route.
There's an urban legend that the Internet was designed to survive
nuclear war. This is not true, but the Internet's design is extremely
good at getting reliable performance out of flaky hardware in am
uncertain world.. This is directly due to the fact that its
intelligence is distributed through thousands of routers rather than a
few massive switches (like the phone network). This means that
failures tend to be well localized and the network can route around
them.
Once your packet gets to its destination machine, that machine uses
the service number to feed the packet to the web server. The web
server can tell where to reply to by looking at the command packet's
source IP address. When the web server returns this document, it will
be broken up into a number of packets. The size of the packets will
vary according to the transmission media in the network and the type
of service.
10.3. TCP and IP
To understand how multiple-packet transmissions are handled, you need
to know that the Internet actually uses two protocols, stacked one on
top of the other.
The lower level, IP (Internet Protocol), knows how to get individual
packets from a source address to a destination address (this is why
these are called IP addresses). However, IP is not reliable; if a
packet gets lost or dropped, the source and destination machines may
never know it. In network jargon, IP is a connectionless protocol;
the sender just fires a packet at the receiver and doesn't expect an
acknowledgement.
IP is fast and cheap, though. Sometimes fast, cheap and unreliable is
OK. When you play networked Doom or Quake, each bullet is represented
by an IP packet. If a few of those get lost, that's OK.
The upper level, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), gives you
reliability. When two machines negotiate a TCP connection (which they
do using IP), the receiver knows to send acknowledgements of the
packets it sees back to the sender. If the sender doesn't see an
acknowledgement for a packet within some timeout period, it resends
that packet. Furthermore, the sender gives each TCP packet has a
sequence number, which the receiver can use you reassemble packets in
case they show up out of order. (This can happen if network links go
up or down during a connection.)
TCP/IP packets also contain a checksum to enable detection of data
corrupted by bad links. So, from the point of view of anyone using
TCP/IP and nameservers, it looks like a reliable way to pass streams
of bytes between hostname/service-number pairs. People who write
network protocols almost never have to think about all the
packetizing, packet reassembly, error checking, checksumming, and
retransmission that goes on below that level.
10.4. HTTP, an application protocol
Now let's get back to our example. Web browsers and servers speak an
application protocol that runs on top of TCP/IP, using it simply as a
way to pass strings of bytes back and forth. This protocol is called
HTTP (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol) and we've already seen one command
in it -- the GET shown above.
When the GET command goes to sunsite.unc.edu's webserver with service
number 80, it will dispatched to a server daemon listening on port 80.
Most Internet services are implemented by server daemons that do
nothing but wait on ports, watching for and executing incoming
commands.
If the design of the Internet has one overall rule, it's that all the
parts should be as simple and human-accessible as possible. HTTP, and
its relatives (like the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, SMTP, that is
used to move electronic mail between hosts) tend to use simple
printable-text commands that end with a carriage-return/line feed.
This is marginally inefficient; in some circumstances you could get
more speed by using a tightly-coded binary protocol. But experience
has shown that the benefits of having commands be easy for human
beings to describe and understand outweigh any marginal gain in
efficiency that you might get at the cost of making things tricky and
opaque.
Therefore, what the server daemon ships back to you via TCP/IP is also
text. The beginning of the response will look something like this (a
few headers have been suppressed):
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 18:43:35 GMT
Server: Apache/1.2.6 Red Hat
Last-Modified: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 17:55:15 GMT
Content-Length: 2982
Content-Type: text/html
These headers will be followed by a blank line and the text of the web
page (after which the connection is dropped). Your browser just
displays that page. The headers tell it how (in particular, the
Content-Type header tells it the returned data is really HTML).
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