Glossary And Lan Fundamentals - HP Vectra VL5 5 Network Manual

3. Glossary and LAN fundamentals

A network is divided into several layers. It is not within the
scope of this document to explain this in details. However,
basic knowledge is required to understand if and where LAN
connection is failing.
IP Address: this is an identifier that allows computers to talk to
each other over a worldwide connection. Setting or obtaining an IP
address is required for the proper operation of most network tasks
under Windows. On the network, an IP address is like a phone
number. The IP address is the telephone number of the PC on a
network. For the moment, IP addresses are 4 bytes in length
(value from 0 to 255). It will soon be 6 bytes.
NetBIOS: this protocol enables users to identify and browse a
network by PC names. However, with no method of enforcing
unique names across sub-networks, this protocol's scope is
limited to sub-networks and is not well suited to interconnection. It
is becoming obsolete.
MAC address: this is a unique identifier that allows computers to
talk to each other over a local sub-network.
DHCP: this is a protocol that allows a client to ask a server for an
IP address. For this to work, your network needs to have an
operational DHCP server. Each time your PC is powered-on it
may be assigned a new IP address through the DHCP protocol. If
your PC is configured as a DHCP client and no DHCP server can
be found, then the OS (Windows 98 or more recent) will auto-
assign a "random" IP address. The address is likely to be:
169.254.xxx.yyy
If two PCs are in auto-assign mode, the address assigned will be
in the range of 169.254.xxx.yyy, with a subnet mask of
255.255.0.0 (these PCs will be part of the same network and will
be able to exchange data without any need of an external server:
DNS, Gateway, or DHCP server).
DNS: This is a server whose role it is to register, maintain and
resolve matches between PC names on the network and their IP
addresses. You do not need a DNS server when you can access
the remote computer directly with its IP address.
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