How does the Internet work? | Hacker News Reader

How does the Internet work?

hwi.uni.be

74 pointsColinWright37 comments

This is awesome!

To the folks complaining about Flash, you don't have a right to view it, someone took the time to build it and it was easiest for them to use flash, the flash is your problem, not the author's.

To the creators - thank you! So few people have any understanding about how the internet works and things like this are wonderful ways for them to mindlessly explore it. As an aside it would be awesome if you could do the same thing for the web too and explain DNS and web servers too.

I liked it, my only issue is I think it would be more clear to have an icon for routers vs using a computer for everything.

I rather like it this way. Routers are just computers, and in fact, any computer could act as a router. If you have a machine connected to your phone for Internet access and to your home network for printing, then it's a router, so this isn't even uncommon.

I think it's useful to make the distinction because general-purpose computers do not contain ASICs, while for example core and provider edge routers tend to.

I really really wanted to be able to run Geocities-izer on the site. But, alas, Flash.

You're right. Flash is the Internet.

Not sure if this is really appropriate, it's only showing a very small part of "Internet" namely TCP/IP and a little bit of routing.

Once you delve into the more low-level stuff (BGP, routing, AS, peerings, RIPE and all that kind of stuff) you get to know that there is soooo much more advanced, deeply technical stuff going on. It's just so much more then tcp/ip, dns and http.. You just typically never have to care about that kind of stuff if you don't happen to work in that area.

BGP is so broken. So many unfiltered prefixes

BGP works very well for it's main purpose. Things like uRPF and explosive table growth aren't BGPs fault. That being said, take a look at LISP (Loc/ID Separation Protocol) if you're interested in such topics.

True, but BGP, AS, etc are largely there to deal with issues that come from the separate networks we've built the internet out of not a fundamental need, if that makes any sense. Basically we /could/ build an internet without BGP, AS's, and a lot of the protocols that deal with interconnecting regional networks, but TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP are the basic building blocks of the internet as we know it.

Sure, but as you said: The internet is not only TCP/IP. I'd expect that in a link titled "How does the Internet work?". The link doesn't come close to how the internet _really_ works, in my opinion. The link merely shows how my LAN works.

ARP is missing for a truer match to LANs. It's a decent primer on the high level details of how the internet works.

I partly disagree. I think the concept separate independent networks is very fundamental to internet, and as such BGP etc are fundamental part of the internet.

It's fundamental to how it's set up currently but not required for the concept as a whole. Given a global telecom operator BGP could be eliminated, so it's a 'lower' level of fundamental than TCP.

If there was a global telecom operating "the internet", it wouldn't be a internetwork of independent networks, which I consider fundamental concept for the internet.

It'd still be an interconnected network of machines. But this is really just coming down to the dividing line between a network and the internet, kind of like the heap of sand paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

Perhaps the title should be 'A simple animation to show novices how the internet works'. It's a great place to start that explanation.

And the further you get into that stuff, the more you figure out that under everything is legal, contractual, and in many cases, purely personal relationships that keep the thing running.

Some folks say that's 'Layer 8' on the OSI model, I think it's more appropriately Layer 0...

Indeed.

It's questionable how complete an explanation of the internet is, with little mention of peering agreements and transit relationships.

> BGP, routing, AS, peerings, RIPE and all that kind of stuff

I have good application development and systems administration skills, I run a variety of server daemons including DNS, I maintain an OpenWRT-based home network on a Linksys WRT54GL (I really should upgrade to N, but the upstream pipe isn't big enough to need it and I don't do a lot of LAN transfers). I've written TCP and UDP applications in the past, and I've never had to worry about any of that -- from an application's perspective, you just put bits in one end of the pipe and they come out the other end (well, if you use UDP, there's some degree of luck involved).

I've only heard those acronyms in passing and don't really know how those things work (well, maybe in a vague theoretical sense).

Does anyone know of good resources for learning those things? For example, how to set up a bunch of VM's which speak BGP and do routing and peering?

Google for CCNA Module 1 through 3. Those acronyms mostly relate to ISP and configuration and running mode of enterprise networks.

The internet works better when content exists in resources with URLs, and not bound inside clunky proprietary data formats like Flash.

Not a fan of Flash either, but the Internet is not the Web.

You say "The Internet works better" without formats like Flash. To my knowledge the Internet does not discriminate between proprietary and non-proprietary data fromats of its content whereas the basic functions of the Web do (URLs, hyperlinks,...).

Yes, but the Web is in the Internet. What's in flash in Web is in flash in Internet, and is often annoying.

The Web is an application running on the Internet. Flash is a plugin of the Web (via the browser).

The content does exist in a URL. That url just happens to point to a flash file. I think what you're meaning to say is "I like it when content exists in resources with URLs an Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf8"

Can you link directly to the "fast or slow" page? How about the "one week later" page under Examples?

No, because they aren't pages. Can you link to page 3 of a pdf?

Is this a recent movie or is it 10 years old ? Not saying that in a negative way! It's well done..

I took a networking course in university, taught by a professor who has never touched a router in his life. But it wasn't that bad of a course--it was more of a theory and philosophy of networking course--so if you were expecting to be able to come out of the course knowing how to configure a router, you were probably in the wrong place.

There was one important thing I learned in the course though, and it forever changed how I see the Internet. I see the internet now as an abstraction, or an abstract communications network. It was created so that device or person A could communicated with person or device E, without concern of what networking technologies exist between A and E.

So take something like:

A ---- (PSTN) ----> B ---- (Microwave) ----> C ---- (Ethernet) ----> D ---- (Cable) ----> E

And the Internet does this:

A ---- (Internet) ----> E

The Internet makes end-to-end communication possible, without having to worry about the underlining network technology.

That is very important thing about internet. Anything that can carry packets of data can potentially carry internet, and anything that can packaged into packets of data can be carried on internet all over the world.

While I can see not including routing and peering among AS's, DNS is pretty fundamental to the the Internet these days. I would consider any explanation that doesn't mention it as pretty lacking.

CDN use has exploded and, from a 30,000 ft view, the Web tends to look a lot like an overlay network on DNS.

Internet didn't work, all I got was a Lego brick with a X on it.

I love how they describe using the telephone or modem. How old is this

The connection speed test is also far too small, so repeating the test gives vastly too small, and probably doesn't ramp TCP up enough on most connections.

This was written for the era of dial-up modems and ISDN, so 490KB would have been an OK test (you didn't want dial-up users to have to wait very long).

I'll be honest, I was really hoping in the middle of looking through this that it was going to burst into a game of Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego.....

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