The Internet Connection: System Connectivity and Configuration, 1st edition
Authors: John S. Quarterman, Smoot C. Mitchell, Carl-Mitchell Smoot
Venue:  (1993)

From the Book:This book explains how to connect your computer or network to the world's largest computer network and community of computer users: the Internet. The Internet The Internet is the largest computer network in the world, consisting of more than 13,000 networks and more than 1,776,000 machines as of July 1993. It has been growing approximately 100 percent annually for the last five years. The TCP/IP protocols used in the Internet are very capable, but are not plug and play. The pool of knowledgeable TCP/IP engineers is not growing as fast as the Internet itself. This book addresses that gap in knowledge. There is no Internet, Inc. to call for service like the old telephone monopoly. The Internet is a worldwide decentralized distributed cooperative interconnection of numerous underlying technologies and organizations with no overall goals, management, or pricing structure. Like the current telephone system, there are many suppliers of Internet connectivity and services, some competing, some complementary. Just as the local telephone company usually does not do the wiring inside your house, your Internet connectivity provider will not set up the environment inside your local host machine or your local network. This book tells you how to do it yourself. The Internet is not like television. When you join the Internet, you become a participant, able to post mail and news; to publish files, documents, and software; and to make your machines directly accessible to others, if you wish. Your machine or network becomes a part of the distributed Internet mail system, and canbecome a server of many other kinds of information. This book tells you how to join the Internet community. The Book This book shows how to connect to the Internet, step by step, from finding a connection through registering a domain and a network number, through configuring your TCP/IP protocols, to running your own domain server and setting up your mail and news systems. Security techniques are described, for use either with or without a router. The most common new Internet services, netfind, archie, WAIS, and gopher, are covered. Access information for network connectivity providers, for domain and IP network number registries, and for other books, is included. Much of the material in this book is applicable to any software platform, because it is about the TCP/IP protocols, which were designed to work with any platform. Singleprocess personal computer operating systems such as MS-DOS and MacOS are most frequently used as clients of network services. The book includes information on where to get TCP/IP software packages for IBM compatibles and Macintoshes. Multi-process operating systems such as UNIX commonly run both clients and servers. Most of the detailed information on the book on setting up and configuring network application servers is about UNIX software. This book is about setting up communications between your host or network and the Internet. That is, it is about communications with the outside world. We must address some internal LAN issues in dealing with external connectivity, but we avoid discussion of issues solely related to LANs, just as we avoid discussion of issues of system administration, unless they also are related to external connectivity. The book includes brief overviews of Internet services and protocols, and it briefly describes what the Internet is and is not, and how it differs from other networks. However, we assume the reader already knows about those other networks, knows about Internet services, and already wants to connect to the Internet. This book shows how to do that. Organization The book begins with two overview chapters, about services and networks. Chapter 1, Internet Services gives a motivational overview of what you can do with the Internet, and then describes the size and growth of the Internet. The bulk of the chapter describes specific Internet services, their facilities and advantages, and the TCP/IP protocols that support them on the Internet. Chapter 2, The Internet and Other Networks gives an overview of the history, protocols, and politics of the Internet and other networks, such as FidoNet, UUCP, BITNET, USENET, that together form the global Matrix of computers that exchange electronic mail. These contextual chapters set the stage and define the terms for the rest of the book. If you are already familiar with the Internet, you may want to skip forward to the other chapters, but there is an amazing amount of disinformation about the Internet in circulation, and these chapters are short and, we hope, accurate. Before you can use the Internet you have to decide how to connect, and you may need to register organizational names and network addresses. Chapter 3, Types of Internet Access categorizes types of access to the Internet, ranging from public hosts to direct fiber optic connections at hundreds of megabits per second. The chapter includes very brief refresher on protocol layering models and Internet protocol layers. Chapter 4, Registering Domain Names and IP Numbers tells exactly how to register a domain name and a network number, and where to get the registration forms by electronic mail, or on paper or CD/ROM. The rest of the chapters show how to set up Internet services, and are presented approximately in the order you are likely to need the services they describe. Chapter 5, Setting Up IP Chapter 6, Setting Up the Domain Name System Chapter 7, Setting Up Internet Electronic Mail Chapter 8, Setting Up USENET News Chapter 9, Security Issues Chapter 10, Setting Up Resource Discovery Services These chapters do not attempt to describe all possibilities in great generality (we've already done that in another book, Practical Internetworking with TCP/IP and UNIX). Instead, they give the short and direct path to getting what you're most likely to need set up as quickly and painlessly as possible. The appendices provide names and addresses for sources of information. Appendix A, Internet Providers lists Internet providers, from public login hosts to dialup and direct IP connectivity providers. Appendix B, Registration Templates includes the actual text of example registration templates for domains and IP network numbers, and the addresses to send them to. Appendix C, Software and Other Information tells where to get the software (often over the Internet itself; sometimes for free; sometimes from commercial suppliers). Appendix D, Further Reading is a brief reading list of books about the Internet and other networks. There is a brief glossary, and a brief index. The cover shows a view of the world from above the north pole, with each of four networks glowing in its own color light. Similar maps appear on four of the endpapers,* showing the whole world, Eurasia, and most of Canada and the United States. As the legends indicate, wide orange ellipses are for UUCP, tall violet ellipses are for FidoNet, blue squares are for BITNET, EARN, and other NJE networks, and green circles are for the Internet; these four networks are the largest distributed networks in the Matrix, and they are described briefly in Chapter 2. The size of an icon indicates the number of host computers near the center of the icon. For example, the map of Eurasia shows the Internet green as the most prevalent in the north and west of Europe, and BITNET (or other NJE network) blue as the most widespread in the middle east. In eastern Europe, Internet green fades into FidoNet and UUCP violet and orange in central Asia, until east Asia suddenly shows all four networks again. However, the Internet is following behind those two access networks, and green Internet circles are visible in Talinn, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Moscow, Novosibirsk, New Delhi, Bombay, and Accra, Ghana. The fourth endpaper shows growth rates of the Internet alone in each country of the world. Much of the world is already connected, from Antarctica to Siberia, from Greenland to Ecuador, from Australia to Austria. The newest countries are growing the fastest, but even the longest connected and most densely networked countries are adding new hosts at exponential rates. Readers This book is for readers who know they want a connection to the Internet, not to a different network. It is for anyone who wants to connect a single machine or a network to the Internet. Such a machine might be in someone's house or office, in a company or a university. Such a network might be in a company office or a university department. Managers and executives can use the book to get a good idea of what is really involved in setting up an Internet connection. Technical people can use the book to actually set up a connection. In 1993 more than a million new machines and ten thousand more networks are expected to connect to the Internet. That is more people confused by technology than all the TCP/IP consultants in the world can help directly. This book can assist many of those people in doing their own basic IP connection configuration. In 1994, two million more machines and twenty thousand more networks are expected. These numbers are just for the Internet proper. There are probably at least as many machines in private IP networks inside companies, and more are forming all the time. Many of these enterprise networks then connect to the Internet, either as full participants, or through one of the kinds of firewalls described in this book. Every company or department considering making such a connection has at least one potential reader. Every engineer involved in setting up the connection, the engineer's manager, and many of the engineer's users, are potential readers. The person wanting to connect may already have electronic mail access to some other network, such as UUCP, FidoNet, or BITNET, or may be a complete newcomer to wide area networking. Even if you work in a place with many network experts, it is very easy to spend a lot of time finding the right person to ask for basic information about a variety of topics. This book answers most of the basic questions, and points you at sources for appropriate registrars, software, and vendors. The book is aimed more at newcomers, but will also be of use to engineers familiar with LANs who want the quick path to setting up wide area Internet services. Most specific details are drawn from the Internet in the United States. Most details are the same in other countries. Where there are major differences, we describe them. The Internet itself is still mostly (60%) in the United States, but already reaches at least 50 other countries, and is growing even more rapidly in some of them than the overall 100% annual growth rate. Thus readers of this book may be anywhere in the world. Terminology and Typography This book is written in American English. We have avoided idioms that might be hard for other English readers to understand. We have also avoided overly formal or academic phrasing, while attempting to maintain clarity. Jargon words and important terms are defined in the glossary, and also appear in the index. Glossary definitions are necesarily brief, and isolated. Definitions of the same terms in the text are often longer, and are always given in context, so you may want to use the index to locate these embedded definitions, as well. Defined terms, whether words, phrases, or acronyms, appear in boldface where they are defined in the text, and sometimes in other places where they are important. Most networking concepts depend on other networking concepts, leading to circular definitions. For this reason, many terms are introduced briefly at the outset, and defined more properly later. For example, major network services are introduced in Chapter 1 and many of them are defined or discussed in more detail in later chapters. Similarly, basics of packet switching are explained in the ARPANET section in Chapter 2, leading into the discussion of network protocol layering in Chapter 3, the discussion of routing in Chapter 5, and the discussion of types of gateways in Chapter 9. Acronyms present some interesting issues. Traditionally in English an acronym is a short sequence of letters, pronounceable or not, derived from a sequence of words, perhaps by taking the first letter of each word. In computing and networking jargon acronyms are not always derived from a longer form; often the reverse is true. That is, frequently an interesting, euphonic, or punning acronym is constructed and later an expansion is produced to fit it. Such expansions serve merely as mnemonics and rationalizations, not as derivations. In addition, many network protocols and networking organizations are known almost exclusively by their acronyms, not by a longer name. For these reasons, we do not follow the usual English convention of always introducing an acronym in parentheses after the longer form of the name. Sometimes we instead give the acronym first, followed by the longer form in parentheses. In addition, it is customary in English to introduce an acronym along with its longer form once only in a text. We also do not follow this custom, since readers may not be reading this book in strict page number order, and even readers who do may easily have forgotten a complicated acronym introduced at the beginning of the book by the time it recurs in a later chapter. Instead we reintroduce an acronym whenever we think it might have been forgotten. All acronyms that are given in the text with an expansion appear in the index, and most also appear in the glossary. Network protocol names are usually given in uppercase, whether they are acronyms or not, as in RLOGIN. UNIX commands are given in lowercase and italics, as in rlogin. Pathnames are given in italics, as in /etc/hosts.equiv.