Texts about networks

[Tim Borgeaud]

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

Sorry to have been a bit vague but I'm not entirely sure what I need to
know. The request infact stems more from Jane than me. At home we are just
getting a little LAN set up, but it'll only have a few machines on it,
however Jane may well have to look after a small school network.

Our knowledge is pretty limited, we know how to connect up machines with
ethernet, UTP plus Hub/switch or COAX. We can give a machine an IP number, a
name and point it to a gateway and DNS. We know basically what
a nameserver does but not how it does it, same for a router. 

We'd like to know much more about many aspects of networking. Such as how
ethernet works, why can there be problems and how to fix them etc. Other
network technologies like token ring, ISDN, DSL. When and why bridging
between networks is required and how it is accomplished. Tunneling and
where and how to use it. Plus NATD, firewalls, protocols: TCP/IP, ftp, http,
smtp nntp, etc etc etc. Also what about MACs and appleshare etc, Windows
domains (sigh). What will happen when moving to IPv5?

There's a huge amount and we'd like to know the most significant things in a
bit more details than the 'teach yourself networking in 2 weeks' kind of
thing.

Tim