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| title | date | tags | draft | heroImage | heroAlt | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How IP routing works | 2023-09-01T03:50:38.386Z |
|
true | ./cableHero.png | futuristic photograph of a bunch of organized network cables |
Many of us have probably heard of an IP address, but how does it actually work? I'm going to try to give a high level overview to technical networking concepts.
Throughout this post I'm going to keep referring back to a train station analogy. We'll start off with a small network and build up into something that scales into the internet we have today.
The simplest network
First, the analogy isn't very far off. Just as there's multiple tracks leading away from a train station, a computer has multiple ports to communicate with other computers, and we typically call these interfaces. For example, a laptop may have a Wi-Fi interface and an Ethernet interface, while a cell phone may have a cellular interface as well. Server computers could have any number of interfaces.
You could imagine a simple network between 3 computers like this: