Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

mechanism used is the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). In fact, ARP is not confined to Ethernet or Token Ring, but is used on other types of networks, such as the amateur radio AX.25 protocol. The idea underlying ARP is exactly what most people do when they have to find Mr. X in a throng of 150 people: the person who wants him calls out loudly enough that everyone in the room can hear them, expecting him to respond if he is there. When he responds, we know which person he is.

When ARP wants to find the Ethernet address corresponding to a given IP address, it uses an Ethernet feature called broadcasting, in which a datagram is addressed to all stations on the network simultaneously. The broadcast datagram sent by ARP contains a query for the IP address. Each receiving host compares this query to its own IP address and if it matches, returns an ARP reply to the inquiring host. The inquiring host can now extract the sender's Ethernet address from the reply.

You may wonder how a host can reach an Internet address that may be on a different network halfway around the world. The answer to this question involves routing, namely finding the physical location of a host in a network. We will discuss this issue further in the next section.

Let's talk a little more about ARP. Once a host has discovered an Ethernet address, it stores it in its ARP cache so that it doesn't have to query for it again the next time it wants to send a datagram to the host in question. However, it is unwise to keep this information forever; the remote host's Ethernet card may be replaced because of technical problems, so the ARP entry becomes invalid. Therefore, entries in the ARP cache are discarded after some time to force another query for the IP address.

Sometimes it is also necessary to find the IP address associated with a given Ethernet address. This happens when a diskless machine wants to boot from a server on the network, which is a common situation on Local Area Networks. A diskless client, however, has virtually no information about itself - except for its Ethernet address! So it broadcasts a message containing a request asking a boot server to provide it with an IP address. There's another protocol for this situation named Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP). Along with the BOOTP protocol, it serves to define a procedure for bootstrapping diskless clients over the network.

IP Routing

We now take up the question of finding the host that datagrams go to based on the IP address. Different parts of the address are handled in different ways; it is your job to set up the files that indicate how to treat each part.

IP Networks

When you write a letter to someone, you usually put a complete address on the envelope specifying the country, state, and Zip Code. After you put it in the mailbox, the post office will deliver it to its destination: it will be sent to the country indicated, where the national service will dispatch it to the proper state and region. The advantage of this hierarchical scheme is obvious: wherever you post the letter, the local postmaster knows roughly which direction to forward the letter, but the postmaster doesn't care which way the letter will travel once it reaches its country of destination.

IP networks are structured similarly. The whole Internet consists of a number of proper networks, called autonomous systems. Each system performs routing between its member hosts internally so that the task of delivering a datagram is reduced to finding a path to the destination host's network. As soon as the datagram is handed to any host on that particular network, further processing is done exclusively by the network itself.

Subnetworks

This structure is reflected by splitting IP addresses into a host and network part, as explained previously. By default, the destination network is derived from the network part of the IP address. Thus, hosts with identical IP network numbers should be found within the same network.[15]

It makes sense to offer a similar scheme inside the network, too, since it may consist of a collection of hundreds of smaller networks, with the smallest units being physical networks like Ethernets. Therefore, IP allows you to subdivide an IP network into several subnets.

A subnet takes responsibility for delivering datagrams to a certain range of IP addresses. It is an extension of the concept of splitting bit fields, as in the A, B, and C classes. However, the network part is now extended to include some bits from the host part. The number of bits that are interpreted as the subnet number is given by the so-called subnet mask, or netmask. This is a 32-bit number too, which specifies the bit mask for the network part of the IP address.

The campus network of Groucho Marx University is an example of such a network. It has a class B network number of 149.76.0.0, and its netmask is therefore 255.255.0.0.

Internally, GMU's campus network consists of several smaller networks, such various departments' LANs. So the range of IP addresses is broken up into 254 subnets, 149.76.1.0 through 149.76.254.0. For example, the department of Theoretical Physics has been assigned 149.76.12.0. The campus backbone is a network in its own right, and is given 149.76.1.0. These subnets share the same IP network number, while the third octet is used to distinguish between them. They will thus use a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Figure 2.1 shows how 149.76.12.4, the address of quark, is interpreted differently when the address is taken as an ordinary class B network and when used with subnetting.

Figure 2.1: Subnetting a class B network

It is worth noting that subnetting (the technique of generating subnets) is only an internal division of the network. Subnets are generated by the network owner (or the administrators). Frequently, subnets are created to reflect existing boundaries, be they physical (between two Ethernets), administrative (between two departments), or geographical (between two locations), and authority over each subnet is delegated to some contact person. However, this structure affects only the network's internal behavior, and is completely invisible to the outside world.

Gateways

Subnetting is not only a benefit to the organization; it is frequently a natural consequence of hardware boundaries. The viewpoint of a host on a given physical network, such as an Ethernet, is a very limited one: it can only talk to the host of the network it is on. All other hosts can be accessed only through special-purpose machines called gateways. A gateway is a host that is connected to two or more physical networks simultaneously and is configured to switch packets between them.

Figure 2.2 shows part of the network topology at Groucho Marx University (GMU). Hosts that are on two