Introduction to Network Operating Systems Addressing
Addressing
In order for packets (the physical data units traveling across the media, which
correspond to the frames created by the data link layer) to find their way across a
network, the source and destinations need to be identified in some way. We refer to
this identifying name as an address. Different layers of the protocol stack require
different addressing mechanisms, as determined by the task to be accomplished at that
layer.
Address Types
MAC Addresses
MAC (Media Access Layer) Addresses are also known as ‘physical’ or ‘hardware’
addresses. These addresses uniquely identify the devices to which physical
media is directly connected. Most commonly these devices are Network
Interface Cards (NICs) designed according to the Ethernet standard. The MAC
Addresses are hard-coded into each card. A host might have several such cards
installed, and each of them will have a unique MAC Address.
MAC Addresses are 48-bit binary numbers, specified for human use as six pairs
of hexadecimal digits separated by hyphens. For instance, A3-BF-12-55-DD-E4
might be the MAC Address for some device. MAC Addresses are assigned by
the IEEE; the first (high-order) 24 bits (3 bytes or 6 hex digits) identify the
manufacturer of the device. The manufacturer then assigns the remaining
portion of the address to each of the devices they manufacturer. For each high-
order identifier a manufacturer has 224 = 16 Million1 individual addresses it can
distribute.
MAC Addresses are used by the Data Link Layer (Layer 2) of the OSI Model
and are frequently referred to as ‘layer 2 addresses.’
Host Names
Host Addressing uniquely identifies a specific host on a network or on the
Internet. It may be hierarchical or non-hierarchical.
Non-hierarchical addresses are used on LANs which do not connect to the
Internet. As discussed earlier, NetBIOS names are an important non-
hierarchical naming mechanism. They consist of 15 characters followed by a 1-
byte control code. The hostname assigned to a computer when networking is
1
As usual, a million = 220, not 106.
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installed is generally also the NetBIOS name.
Domain Names
Hierarchical Addresses allow hosts to be found by an iterative search through a
hierarchy, based on the format of the host name. We are most familiar with
World Wide Web domain names, which generally have at least three parts
separated by periods, such as
Luke.Tatooine.org.
In this name, org is the top-level domain (TLD) name. There are a relatively
small number of top-level domain names, the most well-known of which include
com commercial or business domains
edu educational institutions
gov governmental institutions
mil military institutions
net network providers, such as ISPs (Internet Service Providers)
org non-profit organizations
There are a few others not mentioned here. In addition there has been some
progress in defining some brand-new top level domains such as .name and .biz.
In addition to the TLDs listed above, there is a 2-character TLD assigned to
every country in the world. Thus, the TLD for Japan is jp, for the United Kingdom
it is uk, etc. For instance, the domain name for the BBC is bbc.co.uk.
Second-level domain names are the names immediately preceding the TLD. in
our example, Tatooine would be the second-level domain name. These names
are unique to an organization and we usually just refer to the whole construct
‘Tatooine.org’ as the organization’s domain name. This is the name that you can
purchase (register) and have exclusive use of for your web site, etc.
The first part of the name is the hostname of the name of the host machine
which is being referenced. This is also the NetBIOS name on a windows LAN. If
this machine is running a server process which is being accessed, than this part
of the name, Luke in our example, is also known as the server. In the early days
of the internet most web servers were called www.
Once an organization has registered its domain name it can create additional
hierarchies within its organization, called subdomains. Our Tatooine.org
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domain might elect to create a subdomain called Skywalker, for instance. The
resulting domain name in our example would be
Luke.Skywalker.Tatooine.org
Host Addresses (IP Addresses)
Host addresses, usually called IP Addresses and sometimes Logical Addresses
are binary strings which uniquely identify a host machine on the Internet. Every
device on the Internet which may be the destination of a packet needs an IP
Address.
IP Addresses (IP Version 4, or IPv4) consist of 32 bits, broken up into four bytes
or octets. Again, for human consumption, the convention is to represent these
binary numbers as four decimal integers separated by periods. For example,
192.168.10.1 might be a valid IP Address. Note that since each decimal number
is actually the decimal equivalent of an 8-bit binary number, they can only take
on the values 0 through 255. Thus, 192.268.10.1 is not a valid IP Address since
the second number is greater than 255. We are rapidly running out of available
IP Addresses. To rectify this situation a new version, IPv6, is in the process of
being deployed. IPv6 addresses have 128 bits, providing enough addresses to
assign one to every particle in the universe.
IP Addresses are controlled and distributed by the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Numerous companies have been
authorized to act as registrars for ICANN and IP Addresses can be purchased
through these registrars. How these Addresses are assigned and used will be
discussed later.
Every Domain Name has a corresponding IP Address. The master registry of all
domain names and IP Addresses is maintained by Network Solutions, Inc.
IP Addresses are used by the Network Layer (Layer 3) of the OSI Model and are
frequently referred to as ‘layer 3 addresses.’
Port Addresses
Port Addresses (or Port Numbers) are integers assigned to individual
applications, or processes, running on a host. When a packet is routed through
the Internet (by the Internet Protocol) it is delivered to the designated destination,
but it must now be routed to the appropriate process running on that host. Each
such process is assigned a unique (to that host) number for identification
purposes, called a port address. The range of allowed port numbers is from 0
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through 216-1 (65535).
When a client process, such as a web browser, makes a request it is assigned a
port number by TCP so that when the response (the web page) comes back it
can be forwarded to that browser and not, say, an e-mail client or another
browser. Such client port numbers are assigned randomly by TCP.
On the other hand, when a web browser makes a request, it has to specify that
web server software on the destination host is the intended recipient. In this
case it is clearly not helpful for the web server to have a random port address. In
fact there are a set of well-known port addresses reserved for use by such
servers as web servers, ftp servers, mail servers, etc. The reserved ports are 0
through 1023 (210-1); port numbers above 1023 are generally used for random
assignment to client processes. Some well-known port addresses are 80 (web
servers) 25 (mail servers) and 21 (ftp servers)
Port Addresses are used by the Transport Layer (Layer 4) of the OSI Model and
may be referred to as ‘layer 2 addresses’, although this is not common.
Sockets
A socket identifies a specific interface on a specific host. It consists simply of the
host’s IP Address catenated with the processes port address, separated by a
colon. For example, 192.168.10.103:2055 might be a valid socket interface.
URLs
URL is an acronym for Universal Resource Locator. It is the addressed passed
to a layer 7 (Application layer) process by the user whenever a resource (such as
a web page, or a file being accessed remotely by, say, FTP) is requested from a
remote server. The generic form of a URL is given by
server process://domain name:port/path
The server process is the name of the protocol running on the server machine
which is providing the service. We are most familiar with HTTP which indicates a
web server, but others are often used including FTP for remote file transfers, and
NNTP for newsgroup servers, among others.
The domain name is just what we have been discussing above. It includes the
hostname, any subdomains, and the second and top-level domain names.
The port is usually omitted because any server process is usually listening on
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the appropriate well-known ports.
Process Port
HTTP 80
FTP 21, 20
SMTP 25
NNTP 119
Telnet 23
However, there are occasions when a server is assigned to listen on a port which
is not well-known. For instance, a web server may be set up for the use of a
restricted group of users. It would be configured with a non-well-known port
address and only those users who are permitted access would know what that
port address is. They are then required to explicitly include it in the URL.
The path may be a simply a file name or a more complex path specification (see
the chapter on File Systems) to the desired file. It is also optional in an URL.
The domain name on a particular host actually specifies a directory on that host
which has been identified as the root document directory which is the top of
the subtree on the host which contains the pages which may be accessed by the
server for delivery to requesting hosts. Usually this root document directory
contains a default page (such as index.html) which the server sends to a
requestor if no page or path is specified. However, if the name of a particular file
is known it may be specified in the URL. If the desired file is not in the root
document directory, but somewhere lower down in the subtree, then a full path
needs to be specified.
The following is an example of an URL containing all of these elements.
http://harry.Gryffindor.hogwarts.edu:3055/owls/mail.htm
Can you identify the server process, server host, subdomain, domain name, port,
path and document being requested?
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