23.8.

2020 Networking simplified - Everything curl

Networking simplified

Networking means communicating between two endpoints on the Internet. The Internet is just a
bunch of interconnected machines (computers really), each using their own private addresses
(called IP addresses). The addresses each machine have can be of different types and machines
can even have temporary addresses. These computers are often called hosts.

The computer, tablet or phone you sit in front of is usually called "the client" and the machine out
there somewhere that you want to exchange data with is called "the server". The main difference
between the client and the server is in the roles they play here. There's nothing that prevents the
roles from being reversed in a subsequent operation.

Which machine

When you want to initiate a transfer to one of the machines out there (a server), you usually do
not know its IP addresses but instead you usually know its name. The name of the machine you
will talk to is embedded in the URL that you work with when you use curl.

You might use a URL like "http://example.com/index.html", which means you will connect to and
communicate with the host named example.com.

Host name resolving

Once we know the host name, we need to figure out which IP addresses that host has so that we
can contact it.

Converting the name to an IP address is often called 'name resolving'. The name is "resolved" to
one or a set of addresses. This is usually done by a "DNS server", DNS being like a big lookup
table that can convert names to addresses—all the names on the Internet, really. Your computer
normally already knows the address of a computer that runs the DNS server as that is part of
setting up the network.

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curl will therefore ask the DNS server: "Hello, please give me all the addresses for example.com",
and the server responds with a list of them. Or in the case you spell the name wrong, it can
answer back that the name does not exist.

Establish a connection

With a list of IP addresses for the host curl wants to contact, curl sends out a "connect request".
The connection curl wants to establish is called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and it
works sort of like connecting an invisible string between two computers. Once established, it can
be used to send a stream of data in both directions.

As curl gets a list of addresses for the host, it will actually traverse that list of addresses when
connecting and in case one fails it will try to connect to the next one until either one works or
they all fail.

Connects to "port numbers"

When connecting with TCP to a remote server, a client selects which port number to do that on. A
port number is just a dedicated place for a particular service, which allows that same server to
listen to other services on other port numbers at the same time.

Most common protocols have default port numbers that clients and servers use. For example,
when using the "http://example.com/index.html" URL, that URL specifies a scheme called "http"
which tells the client that it should try TCP port number 80 on the server by default. The URL can
optionally provide another, custom, port number but if nothing special is specified, it will use the
default port for the scheme used in the URL.

TLS

After the TCP connection has been established, many transfers will require that both sides
negotiate a better security level before continuing, and that is often TLS; Transport Layer Security.
If that is used, the client and server will do a TLS handshake first and only continue further if that
succeeds.

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Transfer data

When the connecting "string" we call TCP is attached to the remote computer (and we have done
the possible additional TLS handshake), there's an established connection between the two
machines and that connection can then be used to exchange data. That communication is done
using a "protocol", as discussed in the following chapter.

Traditionally, what is called a download is when data is transferred from a server to a client and
inversely an upload is when data is transferred from the client to the server. The client is down
here. The server is up there.

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