A Metaphor For The Internet

Because the internet feels like smoke and mirrors to a lot of people, a concrete physical metaphor could be very helpful in explaining both the parts of the internet and how it all comes together. The best metaphors to use are: how good old fashion snail mail is transferred around and the network of roads crossing the country. Lets start with your house. Houses have 2 ways to describe them, they have a physical description, “My House has a red brick first floor, white siding on the second floor, a maple to it’s left, and a maple in the left side of the front yard.” this is a description that is fixed and (fairly) hard to change. On the internet, this would be your computers MAC Address Or you can describe it by the street address assigned to it by your City or County and the US Postal Service, as in 833 Montlieu Avenue, High Point, NC 27262.

Your Local US Postal Service is a set of buildings that route letters and packages between different post offices. Stuff goes into one Post Office and gets routed from that office, to a distribution center. The distribution center then sends it to another major distribution center and so on until it reaches the distribution center that serves the remote Post Office. It is then sent to the remote Post Office and then to the house that it needs to go to.

So, the address of your house is very much like an IP address you’d have assigned to you by who you pay to get on the internet. The streets and surrounding neighborhood you’re in could be considered a local area network, where each house has it’s own address, and they’re all connected. The State and City or County is yourISP, most ISPs have a local branch that’s for your region, which could be related to your city/county, the full ISP is the State, and the Internet is a country.

A Working Metaphor for the Internet

• House – (address vs. physical description)
• Local Streets / Neighborhood – LAN
• State, City/County – ISP, local division of ISP
• Country – Internet
• Major Roads (US routes / Bigger State Routes) – Internet Connectivity
• Highways – Internet Backbones
• Post Office – Router (GET Picture of 495/395/95)
• Intersection – Hub
• Highway Intersection (Mixing Bowl) – Switch

Binary

For people who have never really encountered binary, it can seem a little bit intimidating. It really isn’t that bad, trust me. Most people learn math in base 10 in elementary school and learn it through a system that looks something like this (where H is hundreds, T is tens, and O is ones):

Mathematically those columns look something like this:

So:

[ (1 \* 10^2) + (8 \* 10^1) + (5 \* 10^0)] = 185
[(1 \* 100) + (8 \* 10) + (5 \* 1)] = 185

Right? If the number in the ones column is more than ten, you simply carry the number over to the number over to the next column like this: if you have 13 in the ones column you move the 10 into the tens column and leave the 3 in the ones column. The concept is very similar in base 2. The biggest difference is that instead of having 10^0, 10^1, and 10^2 you have 2^0, 2^1, and 2^2:

In binary only two numbers are used: 1 and 0, as opposed to the 0-9 in the base ten system. This is because 1 and 0 are the only numbers that will fit in the columns. In order to write the number 5 in binary you need to break the number down. 5 = 4 +1, both 4 and 1 can be easily converted into base two. 4 = 2^2 and 1 = 2^0, so you put a 1 in the 2^2 and 2^0 columns, and a 0 in any columns between. This results in a chart that looks like this:

So the number 5 in binary is 101.

For your reference:

• 2^0 = 1
• 2^1 = 2
• 2^2 = 4
• 2^3 = 8
• 2^4 = 16
• 2^5 = 32
• 2^6 = 64
• 2^7 = 128

Hex

Hexadecimal (otherwise known as hex) is the code that is usually used in web design as each color is assigned a hex code. It usually looks something like this: #66CC99. What do the letters mean? The letters are numbers that are 10 and greater. here’s the chart:

This next part will be very similar to the binary example above. This time instead of base 2, you’re going to use base 16. So if you do something like this:

And then crunch the numbers – [(2 * 16^2) + (15 * 16^1) + (10 * 16^0)] – we get 762. And no, the 10 and 15 did not show up out of nowhere. Remember that in hex letters equal numbers. 10 = A and 15 = F.

Sometimes there are hex numbers like 235. Without a symbol in front you can’t tell if it’s actually 235, or if it’s 565. Here’s how you can tell the difference: usually there will be either a $ sign, a # sign, or 0x in front of the number. So $235, #235 and 0x235 are the same hexadecimal number.

IP Addresses

An IP address is a number given to a computer (a server or a personal computer) by the ISP. The most commonly used IP address is a 32-bit (4 byte) address. It looks like this in the decimal system: 172.16.0.1 . This number is converted from binary because it tends to be easier for humans to process decimal numbers. In binary the IP address looks something like this: 10101100.00010000.00000000.00000001 – the reason this is a 32-bit address is because in binary there are 32 characters, and it’s 4 bytes because there are 4 groups of 8. These bytes are also called octets.

So what exactly does this number mean?

The first octet defines the class of the network. The class determines how big the address space is for the network… in other words, how many computers can be addressed on the network. A class networks are the largest, and are usually reserved for governments. B class networks are second largest, and are used by ISP’s, corporations, school systems and the like. C class networks are the smallest

A = 0-123 (last 3 octets available for host addressing and subnetting) B = 124- 191 (last 2 octets available for host addressing and subnetting) C = 192 – 223 (last 1 octet available for host addressing and subnetting) D/E = 224 -255 (experimental and testing networks)

EXAMPLE:

If your computer has an address of 158.59.224.135, the address is interpreted as follows: The computer belongs to a class B network, so the first two octets define the network. The last two octets define the specific host on the network, as well as any subnetting.

The first two octets are the IP address assigned by the ISP for all of the computers in that network. The administrator or the user assigns the last two octets to the computer. This means you. If you have a network of, lets say, three computers and your network IP address is 172.16.0.0 you can assign the first computers IP address to be 172.16.0.1 then the second computer’s IP address can be 172.16.0.2, and the third can be 172.16.0.3 . This allows you to keep your network a little more organized.

Give them the IP address of a well-known site as an example.

Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) associates various information with domain names. It serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-readable computer hostnames (ex: http://www.yhspatriot.net) into IP addresses (ex: 158.59.200.111) which networking equipment needs to deliver information. DNS also stores other information such as the list of mail servers. DNS is an essential component of the Internet we use.

DNS makes it possible to assign Internet names to organizations independent of the physical routing hierarchy represented by the numerical IP address. DNS distributes the responsibility for assigning domain names and mapping them to IP networks by allowing an authoritative name server for each domain to keep track of its own changes, avoiding the need for a central register to be continually consulted and updated.