Chapter 6 - Networking Services

Abstract

This chapter covers the behind-the-scene networking services that are essential to ensure computers can communicate each other effectively and efficiently. Although the underlying mechanisms to do this are of no interest or relevance for users or services, network communication underpins business infrastructures and as such deserves the highest priority in a company's IT department. After all, there's no point in having a highly specified server with expensive software, configured to perfection, if nobody can connect to it and use its services. For a variety of reasons, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite today has earned the place of being the standard networking protocol for almost every company and network. Once it was considered too complicated, too slow, and had too high an administrative burden to implement across an enterprise network. Now it has evolved to be more efficient in both functionality and design. And with central administrative services such as the domain name system (DNS) for name resolution and the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) for automatically allocating addresses to computers, the TCP/IP services now include central configuration that makes the TCP/IP suite a viable protocol to implement, support, and work efficiently throughout large network environments.