Chapter 8. Shipping Goods over a (Network) Roadway

Chapter 8. Shipping Goods over a (Network) Roadway

What You Will Learn

After reading this chapter, you should be able to

• Explain how e-mail uses multiple servers

• Describe the two parts of an e-mail address

• Name the two most popular e-mail protocols and describe when they are used most often

• Explain how FTP clients use an FTP server like a warehouse

• Explain what happens before a web browser tries to access a web server

• Describe the process and protocols used between a web browser and a web server

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) designs and builds roadways. The roadways are designed to allow cars and trucks of various sizes to drive over the road. However, the DOT doesn't really think much about what's inside the cars and trucks. Similarly, a LAN allows two computers to send data to each other, but the LAN itselfthe cables, network interface cards (NICs), switches, and hubsdoesn't care about what data is transported inside the LAN frames.

This chapter covers the details about what users need to send over a network. In particular, this chapter describes the types of data generated by typical network-based applications.

Each application has different requirements for what it needs to ship over the network; that's one of the things that makes each application different. However, many applications have some similar needs in terms of what they send. For instance, many applications not only want to ship the data over the network, but they also want to make sure it gets there. They require a set of common transportation tools to provide important functions, such as error recovery. Those common tools are covered in the other chapter in this section, Chapter 9, "Choosing Shipping Options When Transporting Goods over the (Network) Roadway."

But first, you need to read about the applications covered in this chapter. This chapter focuses on three applications: e-mail, file transfer, and World Wide Web.