5.1

More networking, hooray.

The type of cable we used to make them is called cat 5. The wires of a cat5 cable are twisted in pairs in order to cancel out electric current that goes through the wire. The do this via alternating crests. The concept of this is pretty simple. Two different waves moving in the same space with crests that are inversed cancel each other. Physics baby.

Another weird thing is that the send and receive wires are not all located next to each other. This is has something to do with preventing frying your computer, but I don't remember why.

We got our cat 5 ethernet cords to transmit 1-2 gigabits per second. Apparently cat 6 can do 100 gigabits. **** that's fast!

Cat 3 is the ye old cable of the olden times.

Cat 1-2 are the cables we use for our phones, with only four wires inside of them.

We used to connect to the internet via these wires because we would have our modems call an internet server. That was that infuriating noise of death you got when you connected via dsl.

Here are some terms for describing the capabilities of new networking hardworking. Full duplex can send and receive at the same time. Half duplex sends or receives, significantly slowing things down. This is part of the reason why wireless has not overtaken all wires. Wireless can only be half duplex.

A collision occurs when two different machines on a network try to talk exactly at once. These don't happen anymore, because computers come equipped with a handy random number generator that the order they talk in the event of a collision.

Here are three types of gateways:

Hub - This is where everybody on a network receives everything that anyone says on the network. Slow, ancient dinosaur tech.

Switch - They don't send info to everybody on a network. They can direct traffic.

Managed Switch - They have a web server built into them, so you can change all sorts of settings on them, and even kick people off your network you don't like via the settings page. Also, you can set the quality of service for any individual on your network, which prioritizes their communication speed.

Port mirroring is cool thing you can do on a managed switch. The server feigns becoming the port so you can see all the traffic that anyone sends out.

A Mac Adress is eight pairs of numbers and letters give all sorts of info about a piece of tech connected to your network. Want to make sure that the address you are sshing is the computer you are trying to ssh? Use the mac address to verify the hardware of the computer.

Blinking light on a switch says that wire is connected and communicating.

A router is a piece of networking tech that interacts between two similar mediums. Example, one master ethernet cable connected to a router, with other ethernet cables from the machine going in to all use internet at once.

A gatewy connects two different physical mediums. A Modem does this. It takes your phone wire, interprets that data, then allows to connect in your ethernet cable. Two different mediums.

TCP is an envelope. IP is a message. I can't explain that analogy because I don't understand what either of those things actually do.