INTERNET The Internet is the largest network the world has ever seen.

Thousands of millions of people use it everyday. Technically the -Internet can be defined as a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)-bound network of networks using standard protocols for communication. Protocols are the rules that all the networks use to understand each other.

Client-Server Architecture
The Client-Server Architecture is based on the principle where the client computer requests for some data and the data are sent by the server computer through the network. The concept of client/server computing has particular importance on the Internet because most of the programmes are built using this design. A server is a programme that serves (or delivers) something, usually information, to a client programme. A server usually runs on a computer that is connected to a network. The size of that network is not important in the client/server concept it could be a small local area network or the global Internet.

The advantage of this type of design is that a server has to store the information in one format: which could be accessed by various clients working on multiple platforms and located at different places. In the client/server model, multiple client programmes share the services of a common server programme. Both client programmes and server programmes are often part of a larger programme or application.

In the case of the Internet, the Web browser is a client programme that requests services from a Web server. The server is designed to interact with client programmes so that people using the system can determine whether the information they want is there, and if so, have it sent.

Internet Addressing
Each host computer on the Internet has its own unique address. To identify a host on the Internet, three addressing systems have been evolved: A numerical system called IP addressing, a hierarchical naming system called the Domain Name System, and an addressing system called URLs, which are used for identifying sites on the web. IP address : Each computer has a unique numerical address, such as 194.170.32.23 Domain name : Each computer must have a unique name, such as www.hct.ac.ae Uniform Resource Locator : Address of file(s) to be accessible from a host computer

Domain Name System

An Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names

are alphabetic, they're easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com must translate to 198.105.232.4.

So a System which maps domain names (e.g. www.google.co.in) to their corresponding IPs (e.g. 202.101.1.123) is known as domain name system. The essence of DNS is the invention of a hierarchical, domain-based naming scheme and a distributed database system for implementing this naming scheme. It is primarily used for mapping host names and e-mail destinations to IP addresses but can also be used for other purposes. DNS is defined in RFCs 1034 and 1035. Very briefly, the way DNS is used is as follows. To map a name onto an IP address, an application program calls a library procedure called the resolver ( eg. gethostbyname,), passing it the name as a parameter. The resolver sends a UDP packet to a local DNS server, which then looks up the name and returns the IP address to the resolver, which then returns it to the caller. Armed with the IP address, the program can then establish a TCP connection with the destination or send it UDP packets.

The DNS Name Space

The Internet is divided into over 200 top-level domains, where each domain covers many hosts. Each domain is partitioned into subdomains, and these are further partitioned, and so on. All these domains can be represented by a tree, as shown in fig below. The leaves of the tree represent domains that have no subdomains (but do contain machines, of course). A leaf domain may contain a single host, or it may represent a company and contain thousands of hosts.

The top-level domains come in two flavors: generic and countries. The original generic domains were com (commercial), edu (educational institutions), gov (the U.S. Federal Government), int (certain international organizations), mil (the U.S. armed forces), net (network providers), and org (nonprofit organizations).

The country domains include one entry for every country, as defined in ISO 3166. E.g. .in(India), .us (United State). Etc.

In November 2000, ICANN approved four new, general-purpose, top-level domains, namely, biz (businesses), info (information), name (people's names), and pro (professions, such as doctors and lawyers). In addition, three more specialized top-level domains were introduced at the request of certain industries. These are aero (aerospace industry), coop (co-operatives), and museum (museums). Other top-level domains will be added in the future.