Field notes.
Networking, development, archery, and whatever the road throws up. Written from the field.
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…