Module 1 Introduction To Internet
Module 1 Introduction To Internet
1972
First electronic mail message sent
Key Milestones in Evolution
1973-
ARPANET connected to England and Norway
1974-
TCP starts being used for communicating across a
system of networks
1982-
US DoD starts building defense data
networks based on ARPANET technology
1983-
ARPANET splits into ARPANET and MILNET
Internet now in place
TCP/IP standardized
Key Milestones in Evolution
1986-
National Science Foundation (NSF) implements NFSNET;
a system of regional network of routers connected
over a backbone network
1991-
Archie and Gopher released1992-
Internet links more that 17,000 networks
in 33 countries; 3 million hosts
• 1993-
World Wide Web is launched
1995-
Interconnected network providers start offering service
About 30 million users
The Internet Properties
Key properties of the Internet:
The Internet is interoperable.
The Internet is global.
Physical Layer
Local Part: The local part defines the name of a special file,
called the user mailbox, where all the mail received for a user
is stored to be used by the user agent.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Domain Name: The second part of the address is the domain
name.
An organization usually selects one or more hosts to receive
and send; they are called mail exchangers.
The domain name assigned to each mail exchanger either
comes from the DNS database or is a logical name (ex.: the
name of the organization).
ELECTRONIC MAIL
User Agent (UA) The first component of an electronic mail
system is the user agent (UA). A user agent sometimes is called
a mail reader
User Agent Types: There are two types of user agents:
command-driven and GUI-based.
1. Command Driven: Command –driven user agents belong to
the early days of electronic mail.
They are still present as the underlying user agents in servers.
A command-driven user agent normally accepts a one-
character command from the keyboard to perform its tasks.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
GUI – Based: Modern user agents are GUI-based.
They contain Graphical User Interface (GUI) components that
allow the user to interact with the software by using both the
keyboard and the mouse.
They have graphical components such as icons, menu bars, and
windows that make the services easy to access.
Some examples of GUI-based user agents are Eudora,
Microsoft’s Outlook, and Netscape.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Services provided by a User Agent: A user agent is a software
package (program) that composes (new mail), reads, replies
to, and forwards messages.
It also handles mailboxes
ELECTRONIC MAIL
1. Composing Messages A user agent helps the user compose
the e-mail message to be sent out.
Most user agents provide a template on the screen to be filled
in by the user.
Some even have a built-in editor that can do spell checking,
grammar checking, and other tasks expected from a
sophisticated word processor.
2. Reading Messages The second duty of the user agent is to
read the incoming messages.
When a user invokes a user agent, it first checks the mail in the
incoming mailbox.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Most user agents show a one-line summary of each received
mail. Each e-mail contains the following fields.
1. A number field.
2. A flag field that shows the status of the mail such as new,
already read but not replied to, or read and replied to.
3. The size of the message.
4. The sender.
5. The optional subject field.
3. Replying to Messages After reading a message, a user can use
the user agent to reply to a message. A user agent usually
allows the user to reply to the original sender or to reply to all
recipients of the message.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
4. Forwarding Messages Replying is defined as sending a
message to the sender or recipients of the copy. Forwarding is
defined as sending the message to a third party.
A user agent allows the receiver to forward the message, with
the user agent. The inbox keeps all the received e-mails until
they are deleted by the user.
The outbox keeps all the sent e-mails until the user deletes
them. Most user agents today are capable of creating
customized mailboxes.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
Electronic mail can send messages only in (Network Virtual
Terminal) NVT 7-bit ASCII format so it has some limitations
it cannot be used for languages that are not supported by 7-
bit ASCII characters (such as French, German)
Also, it cannot be used to send binary files or video or audio
data.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is a supplementary
protocol that allows non-ASCII data to be sent through e-mail.
MIME transforms non-ASCII data at the sender site to NVT
ASCII data and delivers them to the client MTA to be sent
through the Internet. The message at the receiving side is
transformed back to the original data.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
MIME defines five headers that can be added to the original
SMTP header section to define the transformation parameters:
1. MIME-Version.
2. Content - Type.
3. Content – Transfer – Encoding.
4. Content – ID.
5. Content – Description.
1. MIME – Version: This header defines the version of MIME used.
The current version is 1.1.
2. Content – Type: This header defines the type of data used in
the body of the message.
The content type and the content subtype are separated by a
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Depending on the subtype, the header may contain other
parameters. MIME allows seven different types of data.
3. Content-Transfer-Encoding: This header defines the method
used to encode the messages into 0s and 1s for transport.
4. Content-Id: This header uniquely identifies the whole message
in a multiple- message environment.
5. Content-Description: This header defines if the body is image,
audio, or video.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Mail (or Message) Transfer Agent (MTA)
The actual mail transfer is done through Mail Transfer Agents
(MTAs).
To send mail, a system must have a client MTA: and to receive
mail, a system must have a server MTA.
In the Internet, message transfer is done through a protocol
(and software) named Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
To send a message, we need a client SMTP and a server SMTP,
we show Alice sending an email to Bob with the SMTP clients
and servers needed. Note that mail transfer occurs between
the two mail servers, one at Alice’s site and the other at Bob’s
site. The mail servers can belong to the ISPs to which Alice and
Bob are subscribers, or they can belong to the companies
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Mail Access Protocols
Post Office Protocol, version 3 (POP3):
It’s simple, but it’s limited in functionality.
The client POP3 software is installed on the recipient computer;
the server POP3 software is installed on the mail server.
Mail access starts with the client when the user needs to
download email from the mailbox on the mail server.
The client (user agent) opens a connection with the server on
TCP port 110. It then sends its user name and password to
access the mailbox.
The user can then list and retrieve the mail messages, one by
one.
ELECTRONIC MAIL
IMAP4: Internet Mail Access Protocol, Version 4 (IMAP4).
IMAP4 is similar to POP3, but it has more features
All mail is stored on the server. Messages will appear the same
way every time you set up a new e-mail client, no need to
move messages.You can switch between an e-mail client and
webmail at any time and still have the same messages.
If your computer crashes and you lose the data stored on your
hard drive your e-mail is still safe, because it is stored on the
server.
Makes it easier to access your e-mail using a smartphone
because the messages are not removed from the server.
A user can create, delete or rename mailboxes on the mail
server.
Archie
The Internet community has been amassing text, image,
software, and database resources for over twenty years.
Historically, these resources have been stored in public
repositories known as anonymous FTP servers.
FTP is the Internet-standard high-speed file transfer protocol,
used for exchange of private information by trusted parties
with passwords as well as for publishing information without
passwords, i.e., anonymously.
Hundreds of archives now exist but, up until a year ago, no
one tracked them.
Archie (ARCHIvE server) was developed at McGill University to
index the contents of all FTP servers and provide keyword
searching of the index.
Archie
Its approach is simple but powerful: Every night it re-indexes
roughly one thirtieth of the servers; the result is a database
that is completely refreshed each month.
Although Archie enables you to locate information, it does not
allow you to view or retrieve the information.
To do that, you need FTP software on an IP-connected
workstation or host .
WAIS
Wide Area Information System (a joint project of Apple
Computer, Dow Jones, KPMG Peat Marwick, and Thinking
Machines Corporation) provides a uniform interface to many
full-text databases, together with a sophisticated "relevance
search" capability.
You can search any WAIS database using any word or phrase
and the system will return a menu of documents, ordered from
more to less relevant.
WAIS databases are commonly collections of related data
(The Bryn Mawr Classical Review), primary source documents
(Clinton speeches), or reference works (CIA World Fact Book,
Roget's Thesaurus).
There are currently almost 400 WAIS databases, and new
ones appear frequently.
WAIS
Since it can be difficult to determine the focus of a WAIS
database from its name, a Directory of Servers, itself a WAIS
database, was developed.
You can search this directory for topics that interest you, and it
will suggest WAIS databases for you to explore.
For example, you could search the directory using the keyword
"religion," and you would be referred to three WAIS
databases: the Book of Mormon, the Qur'an, and the Bible.
Gopher
Gopher began as the University of Minnesota's version of
PennInfo, a menu-driven campus-wide information system
(CWIS).
Gopher's simplicity as a distributed, client/server CWIS led to
its rapid adoption by other institutions, some of which
developed new client or server software for desktop or host
computers and contributed them to the Gopher software
archive (accessible via anonymous FTP, naturally).
Soon thereafter, Minnesota offered to provide a menu of all
Gopher servers that any other Gopher could access.
The result was what networkers have been talking about for
years: an interoperating set of information systems linking
several hundred organizations around the world, all with a
common user interface
Gopher
The next step in Gopher's evolution was addition of gateways
to FTP, Telnet (the Internet standard remote terminal protocol),
Archie, WAIS, and WWW.
Gopher was thus transformed from an integrated set of CWIS
programs into the most successful Internet navigation tool.
But success became problematic: As the worldwide menu
structure grew, locating information became increasingly
tedious.
Something like Archie was needed to help researchers locate
information quickly in this new, ever expanding
"Gopherspace."
Veronica
In November, 1992 a search tool, Veronica, was contributed to
Gopher by a team from University of Nevada at Reno.
The original Veronica ("Very Easy, Rodent-Oriented, Net-wide
Index to Computerized Archives," a comic acronym if ever there
was one) provides a search through all menus using a single
keyword.
The result is a dynamically created menu of all Gopher resources
that contain the keyword in their menus.
Now, a second Veronica search tool has appeared--an indexed
WAIS database extended to allow Boolean searches of menu
documents.
Veronica
Although both searches are limited to words in menus (as
opposed to the full text of documents), the combination of
Veronica and Gopher results in a powerful capability to search
for and retrieve information from all over the Internet, with the
location of the information effectively irrelevant.
Web Server
A Web server is a program that generates and
transmits responses to client requests for Web
resources.
Handling a client request consists of several key
steps:
Parsing the request message
Checking that the request is authorized
2. Filter requests
Prevent users from accessing a specific set of web sites.
strings.
Prevent users from accessing video files
Major types of websites
1. Blog : The term blog comes from the word weblog.
Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual,
occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single
subject.
More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed,
rich-text editor.
While a wiki is a type of content management system, it
by Opera Software.
The browser handles common Internet-related tasks
such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-
Web Browser
The browser handles common Internet-related tasks
such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-
mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC
downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web
feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal
computers and mobile phones.
6. SAFARI
Safari is a graphical web browser developed by