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With no router between the computers, all network management must be done manually on each machine, making this a good introductory exercise for networking basics. To eliminate automatic settings so that you can get used to building a network yourself, try using a specially wired Ethernet cable called a crossover cable.Ī crossover cable connects transmit signals coming from one computer to the appropriate receptors on another computer. To begin with, start simple and try creating a two-computer network.
#Crossover definition networking how to
Linux and the TCP/IP stack do a lot of work to make networking simple, but when automated settings aren't good enough to get you the setup your organization needs, it's up to you as the sysadmin to understand how to create network configurations. While a single-node network is useful for some tasks, a network usually refers to more than one computer.
#Crossover definition networking plus
To access them from the machine they're running on, you can use localhost plus the port number (for instance localhost:631 or 127.0.0.1:631) in a web browser. Having an internal IP address is significant because important services, such as the CUPS print server and the server management system Cockpit, provide interfaces over TCP/IP connections. ::1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6 The localhost designation is defined in the /etc/hosts file: $ cat /etc/hostsġ27.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4 You can verify this with the ping command: $ ping -c 1 localhost This might seem like it's cheating, but in fact, it's a valid network in the sense that a computer needs to know how to address itself.Įach computer considers itself as the localhost node, with an internal-only IP address of 127.0.0.1. The most simple network possible is a single-node network. The specifications for this are formally defined as the IP protocol. These are also generally mapped to hostnames, such as laptop and desktop or darkstar or penguin or whatever name you give each machine.
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The systems responsible for making this possible are TCP and IP.Ĭommunication requires a means of transport for messages between them, and computers communicate using digital signals carried over Ethernet cables or radio waves or microwaves. In order for networking to facilitate communication between devices, the machines on the network must be able to find each other. In computing, a network is a collection of two or more computers that can communicate. This article covers the basics of network management using open source.
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Learning basic networking commands can help you understand how a device knows what network to connect to, how to find a shared printer or a file share-or the biggest network of all, the internet. While understanding everything there is to know about networking is a big topic, there's much to learn from your own humble Linux computer's networking stack. One of the sysadmin's most important domains is the network.
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