Category: Networking
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Subnets, With the Maths
A while back I wrote Subnets Without the Scary Maths, and I stand by every word: for a great many days you really can get by on “slash twenty-four means…
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NAT: How Ten Thousand Devices Share One Address
Here is a small mystery hiding in plain sight on your desk. You have a laptop, a phone, a TV, a couple of smart plugs and a games console —…
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Subnets Without the Scary Maths
Right at the end of Networking 101 I promised to come back for the scariest-looking rung on the ladder — subnets — and show it’s far tamer than the notation…
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One Switch, Many Networks: A Gentle Guide to VLANs
Two posts ago I hung a “coloured wristband” on an Ethernet frame and promised it would matter later. Last post, per-VLAN spanning-trees wandered in uninvited. Both were IOUs for this…
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How Switches Quietly Agree Not to Set the Network on Fire
I left the last post on a bit of a cliffhanger: all that neat envelope-wrapping quietly assumes your local network isn’t secretly a tangle of cables looping back on themselves,…
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Envelopes All the Way Down: How Your Data Actually Travels the Network
In the last post I described one web request quietly becoming “a MAC frame carrying an IP packet carrying a TCP segment carrying your HTTP request” — Russian dolls, all…
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Networking 101: What Actually Happens When You Load a Web Page
Type an address, hit enter, a page appears — and when it breaks you are staring at a spinning tab with no idea why. A back-to-basics tour of what actually…