Internet 101 - Chapter 1 : Making LAN

Introduction

Who Am I: Dat One Dev — a game developer who just enjoys making games and documenting his whole journey for the last 2 years.

Just some me talk

Ok ok, I get it — I've stopped posting on my socials for a while now. Sorry for that (yes, I know I'm saying this for the 67th time). But as a student, it's gotten harder and harder to actually write these. And you know what...

I am quitting.

SIKE. I never quit. I don't quit, no matter how hard the environment. If I quit what I like, then what am I without it?

I read a lot of philosophy during this break — don't worry, I'll cover that too — but this blog is a bit different.

Recently I stumbled upon a statement by Sam Altman. At first I misinterpreted it, but it triggered a change in my brain, and recent events made that thought even stronger. The statement:

Sam Altman says AI will soon become a utility like electricity — people will buy it from him by the meter.

Yes, that's the title of an article published by India Today. At first I misinterpreted it, and for a second even assumed Sam was a Disney villain. But even the misinterpretation makes sense — our brains are rotting so fast that the idea of intelligence as something to be bought might turn out true.

Just look at the past. Did we pay for pure water? During the medieval era, mostly not. It was something free — people of that time never imagined water could be something you pay for. Now I can't relate to the Western audience that reads my article, but from an Eastern perspective, I don't think my lineage ever thought of the idea of bills on water. But they exist now.

Same goes for most things. We owned games — now companies force monthly subscriptions on us.

You get the point. And I would never like to be a man who relies on AI for intelligence.

As a teenager, I am addicted to AI, and I know people more addicted to it than me. Take their AI away and they don't even know how to use their laptop.

That's what I'm trying to fix. Starting from basics, I'm trying to teach some important lessons that one must actually learn. These will go from simple to advanced as I learn myself.

So I'm starting with Internet and Networks as my first step.

Why? No particular reason — I wondered how the internet works. Although I knew basics like IP, LAN, WAN, ISP, DNS, I recently found not all people know about it. Then I decided to learn myself, and learned that even what I knew was not basics — it was a quarter of basics.

Always accept you know less.

I'll drop many quotes throughout this, and also cover some articles I read during the break. Now, apart from yapping, let's get on with the job and actually learn about networking.

Internet

Now, what is internet, I may ask. And you might answer something like... well, that's a very basic question. We all know internet is often defined as a network of networks.

And what's a network? The experienced reading this might easily get the idea. But the newbies might still debate this or that. Don't worry — I'll try my best to go from absolute nothing. And by nothing, I lwk mean nothing. So let's imagine nothing.

But nothing is so empty... not?

Let's add a room here. A large room, lwk like a hall.

Hmm... now it's boring. We need some souls here. Let's add 4 people:

Mickey, Thorfinn, Robert Frost, and Nachiketa.

Is there any reason I added authors, fiction warriors, comedians, and one literally considered a god into one room? Well... none.

And please, if I write something that hurts your emotions, I already ask sorry for that (regarding Nachiketa, as some might think of him as a god).

Ok, I realized adding Nachiketa is already controversial. Let's change it. With...

I'll add myself, lol. So a room that has Mickey, Thorfinn, Robert Frost, and Kartik.

But what will they do in one room? Actually, more like 4 rooms — they can't connect to one another.

Well, let's give them a computer each.

Now each one of them has a computer.

Thorfinn, being a warrior, opens the computer, sees no internet, and was about to break the PC — then stopped, because well, internet didn't have an enemy.

(Ok, I should stop dropping random references to anime that people rarely watch.)

Well, now we need to give them a way to connect to one another. But that's the question — how?

One setup I can imagine is as follows:

We can connect each of the 4 PCs with wires to the other three. This will help send data from one to another. Well, this setup works for now. But what if I add 10 people into the room?

Ok, now it already looks so complex that I can't even draw it.

Thus we need something centered — something that every PC in the room can connect to, without letting Robert write another poem in the meantime.

Well, I have a solution.

SWITCH DEVICE

Hardware device that can connect multiple devices like computers, printers, and servers together within a single LAN. They are not wireless — they need wires.

The given definition is easy. The only hard word there is LAN, which I'll define soon, don't worry, lwk.

Here's a photo of a switch device — they have these ports behind them which can be connected through a wire to your device.

Now all 4 devices in our hypothetical room connect to 1 switch, through a wire.

And yes — through a WIRE. Forget your wireless life. We're on wires right now. The whole world still runs on these, and would probably still run on them because they are goated.

Switch devices support many wires. Common ones are CAT 5 and CAT 6, where obviously CAT 6 is more powerful and faster than CAT 5. You might also observe CAT 5e. Just so you know, CAT is not a word named by a cat lover — and yes, it feels like a stab to a dog lover — instead, CAT refers to category.

Now, all 4 devices connected to a switch device. When Mickey wants to talk to Kartik, he sends a packet to the switch. The switch reads the header of the packet and finds that yeah, this is what I gotta send to Kartik, and sends it to Kartik's device.

What is a packet, you may ask? You can think of it as a small chunk of data sent over the internet. Some might also call it a frame or data batch online. We'll use the word packet for now — it feels good to me, idky.

Ok wait, my music stopped, let me turn it back on.

Ok, back after turning on music. So our packets have 2 major parts in them: Header and Payload. Payload is the data sent by Mickey to Kartik. The header is where it's going, to whom, and data like this.

This setup of 4 PCs with 1 switch made something that we recently mentioned — LAN, standing for Local Area Network.

(Someone once answered that LAN is Large Area Network and I was surprised af like bro... bro... what are you doing bro...)

And yes, that's it for Part 1 of this course. In Part 2, we'll go for the wireless approach towards the same setup.

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