Overview of TCP/IP for non techies? Please help?

Question

Hi,

I am a banker. I would like to learn a bit about TCP/IP. I am getting confused. There are just too many things. I learnt HTML a bit. Now someone tells me about NTP and LDAP. And there is DNS poisoning. Does yahoo mail work on POP or IMAP or SMTP?

Is there some "short and sweet" introduction to all this for non techies? And why are caches so important?

Answer 1

Download good books for TCP/IP here: http://vicky-e-books.blogspot.com

(very good collection)

Answer 2

That's a lot of detailed stuff, I will give you the overview but I dunno how much you want to know.

TCP/IP is a protocol, which means its basically the format used to send data on the internet. In TCP/IP every computer has an address called an IP, so you can send information between two addresses. When data gets fired out your computer, it has an address attached to tell whatever servers it ends up at where to take it.

NTP is a time protocol, which is used purely to get and synchronise the time of devies, it connects to an NTP server.

LDAP is a protocol that runs on top of TCP/IP, which basically lets you do stuff with directories, like say a telephone directory.

remember protocols are basically just standardised ways of doing things... they have big manuals that explain how to correctly write a program that uses the protocol.

DNS poisoning is something that has been brought to light recently, the explaination of how it's done is very technical but basically, a cache is where if you have 1 computer that has a webpage, and 10,000,000 people want to view it, the server can't possibly service them all without crashing. So the internet service providers usually download popular pages, such as the home page of CNN, and store in on their own server. When you ask to see CNN.com it actually just shows you the servers own copy of CNN.com so the CNN.com server doesn't get torn apart by millions of viewers.

So the cache is basically the ISPs repository of sites from around the world that it stores for its clients to make their internet experience faster.

DNS is where you type something like www.yahoo.com and the DNS server changes that into an IP address (for example 123.183.92.15). One form of DNS poisoning is to find a way to compromise the cache and change it. You could change what people see when they visit CNN.com because their ISP will give them a copy of the page from its own cache rather than letting you go to the real website. So change that, instead of the real site, and you can change what users see.

Lastly, mail, POP is where you have an e-mail client such as Outlook that connects to a server and downloads the mail from it. IMAP is where the mail is stored on the server, and you merely view it rather than download it, so web-mail that you view online is like that. Also outlook can do IMAP where you connect to a server and it shows all your mail like hotmail, but it doesn't download it until you click a message to view (and even then it stays on the server). this is often used by academic institutions like universities.

SMTP is a protocol for sending mail.

Answer 3

Well you could search your answers online alot of tutorials are available online. You have asked tons of questions on few lines lol. So here goes :-

Tcp/ip is set of protocol to make two or more computers talk in one standard procedure also called OSI Layers. More info can be found here http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/4...

NTP is basically protocal install on a time server to keep the time synchronized all over the network. Its pretty basic concept.

LDAP is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol which contacts the Domain server which keeps staff or people username and password for windows environment authentication.

DNS Poisoning : You should look up Cain & Abel its a hacking software which performs the same functions. Basically it fools the PC by giving it wrong address for a website. If a hacker wants to hack your password for some site he would redirect traffic for that website to a clone site which has the same look and feel and when you put your username and password it would be sent to the hacker instead of the site. You should also read about "Man in the Middle Attack'.

No idea what yahoo uses but for paid customers they have option to connect through POP3.