Computer Networks

Dr. R. Sreekanth
Sr. Asst. Professor, Department of MCA
New Horizon College of Engineering, Bengaluru

Lesson – 2

Port
A port can be referred to as a logical channel through which data can be sent/received to an application. Any host may have multiple
applications running, and each of these applications is identified using the port number on which they are running.

A port number is a 16-bit integer, hence, we have 216 ports available which are categorized as shown below:

PORT TYPES RANGE

Well known Ports 0 – 1023

Registered Ports 1024 – 49151

Ephemeral Ports 49152 – 65535

Number of ports: 65,536

Type “netstat -a” in the command prompt and press ‘Enter’, this lists all the ports being used.
Socket:

• The unique combination of IP address and Port number together are termed as Socket.
DNS Server:

• DNS stands for Domain Name system.

• DNS is basically a server which translates web addresses or URLs (ex: www.google.com) into their corresponding IP addresses. We don’t
have to remember all the IP addresses of each and every website.

• The command ‘nslookup’ gives you the IP address of the domain you are looking for. This also provides the information of our DNS
Server.
• ARP:
ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol.
It is used to convert an IP address to its corresponding physical address(i.e., MAC Address).
ARP is used by the Data Link Layer to identify the MAC address of the Receiver’s machine.

• RARP:
RARP stands for Reverse Address Resolution Protocol.
As the name suggests, it provides the IP address of the device given a physical address as input. But RARP has become obsolete since the
time DHCP has come into the picture.

Uses of Computer Networks (Applications)

• Business Applications

• For example, a company may have separate computers to monitor production, keep track of inventories, and do the payroll. Initially,
each of these computers may have worked in isolation from the others, but at some point, management may have decided to connect
them to be able to extract and correlate information about the entire company.

• Resource sharing – Group of office workers sharing common printer

• Goal is to make all programs, equipment, and especially data available to anyone on the network without regard to the physical location
of the resource and the user.

• More important than physical resources sharing, is sharing information.

• All companies depend on computerized information.

• They have customer records, inventories, accounts receivable, financial statements, tax information, and much more online. If all of its
computers went down, a bank could not last more than five minutes.
• A modern manufacturing plant, with a computer-controlled assembly line, would not last even that long. Even a sm

• all travel agency or three-person law firm is now highly dependent on computer networks for allowing employees to access relevant
information and documents instantly.

• This goal may be summarized by saying that it is an attempt to end the ''tyranny of geography.‘’ One can imagine a company's
information system as consisting of one or more databases and some number of employees who need to access them remotely.

• In this model, the data are stored on powerful computers called servers.

• Often these are centrally housed and maintained by a system administrator. employees have simpler machines, called clients, on their
desks, with which they access remote data, for example, to include in spreadsheets they are constructing. The client and server
machines are connected by a network,

A network with two clients and one server

• It is widely used and forms the basis of much network usage. It is applicable when the client and server are both in the same building
(e.g., belong to the same company), but also when they are far apart.

• For example, when a person at home accesses a page on the World Wide Web, the same model is employed, with the remote Web
server being the server and the user's personal computer being the client. Under most conditions, one server can handle a large number
of clients.

• If we look at the client-server model in detail, we see that two processes are involved, one on the client machine and one on the server
machine. Communication takes the form of the client process sending a message over the network to the server process.

• The client process then waits for a reply message. When the server process gets the request, it performs the requested work or looks up
the requested data and sends back a reply.