Whether it’s wired or wireless, most data communications today happens by way of packets of information travelling over one or more networks. But before these networks can work together, though, they ...

Getting a handle on the invisible part of your network—the protocols that are in use—can be of enormous value in helping you detect problems. So far, we've talked about the tangibles of your ...

Networking is a fundamental aspect of modern computing, underpinning everything from small home offices to large enterprise data centers. For Linux system administrators and network engineers, a ...

A tutorial on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking reference model plus tips on how to memorize the seven layers. The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model is a conceptual framework that ...

A reference model is a virtual model which defines how communication should take place. It logically divides the processes which are required for the communication into layers. This concept is known ...

I like to think of the transport layer as the layer of the OSI Model that enables more interesting traffic. While we network engineers may love a lot of the simpler uses of the IP protocol and ...

Whether it’s wired or wireless, most data communications today happens by way of packets of information travelling over one or more networks. But before these networks can work together, though, they ...

Ethernet is a layer 2 data link protocol that is widely used with the TCP/IP protocol, which resides at layers 3 and 4. To understand network communications, it is essential to learn about the ...

Do you remember when we used multi-protocol routing for IPX, AppleTalk, and TCP/IP running on the same network? In the 1980s and early 1990s many enterprises had multiple protocols running on the ...