The structure of the Internet

The Internet is a tangled web of different machines in different networks with

different users. A regular user does not need to understand all the complicated
ways in which the Internet works. A general idea of its structure is enough to
get the most out of it.
The participants in the Internet are a wide variety of machines, organizations
and individuals (whose number keeps increasing steadily), all able to
communicate and share information.
Each machine in the Internet is called a host. Hosts may be of many different
types, as the following figure shows:

Variety of Internet hosts

The next diagram shows how a user in the USA send a mail to an user in the
Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Madras. The user, from
her home at USA, dials up (2400 bytes per second line) to a workstation in a
university, writes and sends the message. The workstation send the mail, via a 2
Mbps line, to JVC net, a provider of Internet services. From there, a connection
via satellite is made to the Software Technology Park, in Bangalore. There, the
mail is forwarded to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, via another satellite
connection. Finally, the user in the Theoretical Physics Department of the
University of Madras, dias up to IMSc, and collects his mail.

A connection between USA and Madras

The hosts of the Internet have names assigned to them in a structured way. The
convention used is known as DNS, Domain Name System. A person with
access to a machine or network, will have a user name in that system. The user
name, together with the host/network name, forms the e-mail address of the
person. For example, rahul@imsc.res.in is the e-mail address of a person with
user name "rahul", in the domain "imsc.res.in" This last name contains quite
some information: it is divided in several subdomains: "imsc", which is the
domain that identifies all the machines in the Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, and "ernet", the Educational and Research Network in India. Finally,
the address ends with the domain that identifies the country, in this example
"in" for India. So we can see that the structure of the e-mail address of the
typical Internet user is
account@[subdomain].[subdomain]...domain
The domain is the right most label, and they are organized in a very well-
specified and regulated system. The domains in the USA are gov, edu, arpa,
com, mil, org and net. Outside the USA, each nation has a domain assigned to
it, e.g. in=India, es=Spain, fr=France, etc. Within a nation there might be
several subdomains, like "ac" for academic institutions in the uk (United
Kingdom) domain. The following picture shows an example of domain
structure.
 Domain structure within India

The IP (Internet Protocol) address is the underlying identifier used by protocols

that govern the Internet information exchange. Machines know each other by IP
addresses, rather than names. For example, the host imsc1.imsc.res.in has IP
address 202.41.95.2 When you send a message, or open an ftp connection, to
another machine, your local host will try first to find the IP address of the host
you are trying to connect. This is done via name servers, which are machines
containing files with IP addresses. A way of finding an IP address
corresponding to a given DNS name is by using the facility "nslookup" Details
will be given in the practical demonstration. When you want to have an address
for a new computer, you need to register it properly, so that it gets an IP
address in an organized way, and the rest of the Internet knows about your
machine. Registration is done usually by the "superuser" of your system. More
information can be obtained from doe.ernet.in for hosts in academic institutions
within India.