Andy Blankenbiller, Army at Aberdeen [email protected] Alan Emtage, McGill University Computer Science Department
Brian Fitzgerald Brian Fitzgerald, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
John Goetsch John Goetsch, Rhodes University, South Africa [email protected] Jeff Kellem, Boston University's Chemistry Department [email protected] Bill Krauss, Moravian College
Steve Lodin Steve Lodin, Delco Electronics
Mike Nesel Mike Nesel, NASA
Bob Bob Neveln, Widener University Computer Science Department [email protected] (Wanda Pierce) Wanda Pierce, McGill University Computing Centre [email protected] Joshua Poulson, Widener University Computing Services [email protected] Dave Sill, Oak Ridge National Laboratory [email protected] Bob Smart, CitiCorp/TTI [email protected] Ed Vielmetti, Vice President of MSEN
Craig E. Ward Craig Ward, USC/Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Glee Willis Glee Willis, University of Nevada, Reno
Charles Yamasaki Chip Yamasaki, OSHA
Network Basics
We are truly in an information society. Now more than ever, moving vast amounts of information quickly across great distances is one of our most pressing needs. From small one-person entrepreneurial efforts, to the largest of corporations, more and more professional people are discovering that the only way to be successful in the '90s and beyond is to realize that technology is advancing at a break-neck pace---and they must somehow keep up. Likewise, researchers from all corners of the earth are finding that their work thrives in a networked environment. Immediate access to the work of colleagues and a ``virtual'' library of millions of volumes and thousands of papers affords them the ability to encorporate a body of knowledge heretofore unthinkable. Work groups can now conduct interactive conferences with each other, paying no heed to physical location---the possibilities are endless.
You have at your fingertips the ability to talk in ``real-time'' with someone in Japan, send a 2,000-word short story to a group of people who will critique it for the sheer pleasure of doing so, see if a Macintosh sitting in a lab in Canada is turned on, and find out if someone happens to be sitting in front of their computer (logged on) in Australia, all inside of thirty minutes. No airline (or tardis, for that matter) could ever match that travel itinerary.
The largest problem people face when first using a network is grasping all that's available. Even seasoned users find themselves surprised when they discover a new service or feature that they'd never known even existed. Once acquainted with the terminology and sufficiently comfortable with making occasional mistakes, the learning process will drastically speed up.
Domains
Getting where you want to go can often be one of the more difficult aspects of using networks. The variety of ways that places are named will probably leave a blank stare on your face at first. Don't fret; there is a method to this apparent madness.
If someone were to ask for a home address, they would probably expect a street, apartment, city, state, and zip code. That's all the information the post office needs to deliver mail in a reasonably speedy fashion. Likewise, computer addresses have a structure to them. The general form is:
a person's email address on a computer: [email protected] a computer's name: somewhere.domain
The user portion is usually the person's account name on the system, though it doesn't have to be. somewhere.domain tells you the name of a system or location, and what kind of organization it is. The trailing domain is often one of the following:
com Usually a company or other commercial institution or organization, like Convex Computers (convex.com).
edu An educational institution, e.g. New York University, named nyu.edu.
gov A government site; for example, NASA is nasa.gov.
mil A military site, like the Air Force (af.mil).
net Gateways and other administrative hosts for a network (it does not mean all of the hosts in a network). {The Matrix, 111. One such gateway is near.net.}
org This is a domain reserved for private organizations, who don't comfortably fit in the other classes of domains. One example is the Electronic Frontier Foundation named eff.org.
Each country also has its own top-level domain. For example, the us domain includes each of the fifty states. Other countries represented with domains include:
au Australia ca Canada fr France uk The United Kingdom. These also have sub-domains of things like ac.uk for academic sites and co.uk for commercial ones.
FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name)
The proper terminology for a site's domain name (somewhere.domain above) is its Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). It is usually selected to give a clear indication of the site's organization or sponsoring agent. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's FQDN is mit.edu; similarly, Apple Computer's domain name is apple.com. While such obvious names are usually the norm, there are the occasional exceptions that are ambiguous enough to mislead---like vt.edu, which on first impulse one might surmise is an educational institution of some sort in Vermont; not so. It's actually the domain name for Virginia Tech. In most cases it's relatively easy to glean the meaning of a domain name---such confusion is far from the norm.
Internet Numbers
Every single machine on the Internet has
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