What is Internet

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol
suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private,
public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic,
wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services,
such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail,
telephony, and file sharing.

History of the Internet

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in
allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of
MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the
theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a
Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of
wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet
switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These
visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US
(UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray
Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and
address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments
(RFC) in 1972. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973. The
Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further
developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Defense Department
in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for
information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system
of embedding links in text to link to other text.

As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social
networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in many
more ways. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and many more
let people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others everywhere.

How the Internet works?

The Internet is a network of networks. If the network in our home or organization has Internet access, it connects to an
Internet service provider (ISP). These providers connect to one another, exchanging traffic, and ensuring our messages
can get to any other computer that’s online and willing to communicate with us. The Internet has no center and no one
owns it. The Internet was designed to be redundant and fault-tolerant—meaning that if one network, connecting wire,
or server stops working, everything else should keep on running.

When we type an address into a Web browser (called a URL for uniform resource locator), we are telling our browser
what we are looking for.

Top Level
Host File
Domain

https://www.nytimes.com/tech/index.html

Hypertext Path
Domain
Transfer
Name
Protocol

The http stands for hypertext transfer protocol. A protocol is a set of rules for communication. The http protocol defines
how Web browser and Web servers communicate and is designed to be independent from the computer’s hardware
and operating system. The Internet supports lots of different applications, and many of these applications use their own
application transfer protocol to communicate with each other. The server that holds our e-mail uses SMTP, or simple
mail transfer protocol, to exchange mail with other e-mail servers throughout the world. FTP, or file transfer protocol, is
used for file transfer. When we surf to an online bank or when we are ready to enter our payment information at the
Web site of an Internet retailer, the http at the beginning of our URL will probably change to https (the “s” is for secure).
That means that communications between our browser and server will be encrypted for safe transmission.

The next part of the URL holds the host and domain name. Think of the domain name as the name of the network we
are trying to connect to, and think of the host as the computer we are looking for on that network. Many domains have
lots of different hosts. For example, Google’s main website is served from the host named “www” (at the address
http://www.google.com), but Google also runs other hosts including those named “drive” (drive.google.com), “photos”
(photos.google.com), and “contacts” (contacts.google.com). Most websites are configured to load a default host, so we
can often eliminate the host name if we want to go to the most popular host on a site (the default host is almost always
named “www”), also most browsers will automatically add the “http”. Host and domain names are not case sensitive, so
we can use a combination of upper and lower case letters and we’ll still get to our destination.

When we look to the right of the top-level domain, we might see a slash followed by either a path name, a file name, or
both. If a web address has a path and file name, the path maps to a folder location where the file is stored on the server;
the file is the name of the file we are looking for.

Most web pages end in “.html,” indicating they are in hypertext markup language. While http helps browsers and
servers communicate, html is the language used to create and format (render) web pages. A file, however, doesn’t need
to be .html; Web servers can deliver just about any type of file: Acrobat documents (.pdf), PowerPoint documents (.ppt
or .pptx), Word docs (.doc or .docx), JPEG graphic images (.jpg).

We don’t always type a path or file name as part of a web address, but there’s always a file lurking behind the scenes. A
web address without a file name will load content from a default page. For example, when we visit “google.com,”
Google automatically pulls up a page called “index.html,” a file that contains the web page that displays the Google logo,
the text entry field, the “Google Search” button, and so on.
What is IP Address?

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, router, etc)
participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses are the identifier
that allows information to be sent between devices on a network: they contain location information and make devices
accessible for communication. The internet needs a way to differentiate between different computers, routers, etc. IP
addresses provide a way of doing so and form an essential part of how the internet works. IP addresses are not random.
They are mathematically produced and allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Two versions of
the Internet Protocol (IP) are in use: IP Version 4 (IPv4) and IP Version 6 (IPv6). Each version defines an IP address
differently.

IP Version 4

An IPv4 address is a string of numbers separated by periods. In IPv4 an address consists of 32 bits which limits the
address space to 4294967296 (2^32) possible unique addresses. IPv4 addresses are represented in dotted-decimal
notation, which consists of four decimal numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots, e.g., 172.16.254.1.
Each part represents a group of 8 bits (octet) of the address. So, the full IP addressing range goes from 0.0.0.0 to
255.255.255.255.

IP Version 6

The rapid exhaustion of IPv4 address space prompted the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to explore new
technologies to expand the addressing capability in the Internet. The permanent solution was deemed to be a redesign
of the Internet Protocol itself. This new generation of the Internet Protocol was eventually named Internet Protocol
Version 6 (IPv6) in 1995. The address size was increased from 32 to 128 bits (16 octets), thus providing up to 2^128
(approximately 3.403×1038) addresses.

Network address: It identifies a network on internet. Using this, we can find range of addresses in the network and total
possible number of hosts in the network.

Mask: It is a 32-bit binary number that gives the network address in the address block when AND operation is bitwise
applied on the mask and any IP address of the block.

IP Address Allocation Techniques

1. Classful Addressing
 2. Classless Addressing

1. Classful Addressing: The 32 bit IPv4 address is divided into five sub-classes. These are: Class A, Class B, Class C,
Class D and Class E. Each of these classes has a valid range of IP addresses. Classes D and E are reserved for
multicast and experimental purposes respectively. The order of bits in the first octet determine the classes of IP
address.

IPv4 address is divided into two parts: Network ID and Host ID. The class of IP address is used to determine the bits
used for network ID and host ID and the number of total networks and hosts possible in that particular class. Each
ISP or network administrator assigns IP address to each device that is connected to its network.

The default mask in different classes are :

Class A – 255.0.0.0
Class B – 255.255.0.0
Class C – 255.255.255.0

Problems with Classful Addressing:

The problem with classful addressing method is that many of the addresses in a network of class A or class B are wasted,
whereas, number of addresses available in a network of class C is so small that it cannot cater the needs of
organizations. Class D addresses are used for multicast routing and are therefore available as a single block only. Class E
addresses are reserved. Due to these problems, Classful addressing was replaced by Classless Inter-Domain Routing
(CIDR) in 1993.

Subnetting: Dividing a large block of addresses into several contiguous sub-blocks and assigning these sub-blocks to
different smaller networks is called subnetting. It is a practice that is widely used when classless addressing is done.

2. Classless Addressing: Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) is a method of IP address allocation and IP routing that
allows for more efficient use of IP addresses. CIDR is based on the idea that IP addresses can be allocated and routed
based on their network prefix rather than their class, which was the traditional way of IP address allocation. CIDR
addresses are represented using a slash notation, which specifies the number of bits in the network prefix. For
example, an IP address of 192.168.1.1 with a prefix length of 28 would be represented as 192.168.1.1/28. This
notation indicates that the first 28 bits of the IP address are the network prefix and the remaining 4 bits are the host
identifier. Here, subnet mask is found by putting the given number of bits out of 32 as 1, like, in the given address,
we need to put 28 out of 32 bits as 1 and the rest as 0, and so, the subnet mask would be 255.255.255.240.

Rules for forming CIDR Blocks:

 All IP addresses must be contiguous.
 Block size must be the power of 2 (2^n). If the size of the block is the power of 2, then it will be easy to divide the
Network. Example: If the Block size is 2^5 then, Host Id will contain 5 bits and Network will contain 32 – 5 = 27 bits.

 First IP address of the Block must be evenly divisible by the size of the block. in simple words, the least significant
part should always start with zeros in Host Id.

Example: Check whether 100.1.2.32 to 100.1.2.47 is a valid IP address block or not?

 All the IP addresses are contiguous.

 Total number of IP addresses in the Block = 16 = 2^4.
 1st IP address: 100.1.2.00100000 Since, Host Id will contains last 4 bits and all the least significant 4 bits are
zero. Hence, first IP address is evenly divisible by the size of the block.

All three rules are followed by this Block. Hence, it is a valid IP address block.