Chapter 1. Unicast Protocols

MANY PEOPLE HAVE ONLY A VAGUE IDEA of what routing is and how it works. When the knowledgeable Linux user or novice system administrator thinks of routing, he or she thinks of it in terms of a black box that takes chunks of data, looks at where the data is trying to go, and sends the data happily skipping along in the right direction. This in some ways is not far from the truth.

A router is basically a traffic director.When data travels throughout IP networks, as well as in many other kinds of networks, many different paths are usually available for it to take. Data is bundled in packets—the individual units of data ...

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