Can anyone post answers for this?

[balz]

- Difference between a Router/Hub/Switch? Explain the process when a packet leaves a host and travels to another host, on same network/different networks. What happens if the host doesn't exist, what does the switch/router/hub do? Where do consecutive requests go? (cache)

- Explain how traceroute works (explain incrementing the TTL field)

- Explain the exec / fork process. How do you get the return value of a child that died (i.e. structure returned from waitpid() and wait())

- Explain what the load average is (a: the number of processes averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes that are marked as: R, S, D); where does ‘uptime’ get this information from?

[shivashankar]

Hi,

A hub is typically the least expensive, least intelligent, and least complicated of the three. Its job is very simple: anything that comes in one port is sent out to the others. That's it. Every computer connected to the hub "sees" everything that every other computer on the hub sees. The hub itself is blissfully ignorant of the data being transmitted. For years, simple hubs have been quick and easy ways to connect computers in small networks.

A switch does essentially what a hub does but more efficiently. By paying attention to the traffic that comes across it, it can "learn" where particular addresses are. For example, if it sees traffic from machine A coming in on port 2, it now knows that machine A is connected to that port and that traffic to machine A needs to only be sent to that port and not any of the others. The net result of using a switch over a hub is that most of the network traffic only goes where it needs to rather than to every port. On busy networks this can make the network significantly faster.

A router is the smartest and most complicated of the bunch. Routers come in all shapes and sizes from the small four-port broadband routers that are very popular right now to the large industrial strength devices that drive the internet itself. A simple way to think of a router is as a computer that can be programmed to understand, possibly manipulate, and route the data its being asked to handle. For example, broadband routers include the ability to "hide" computers behind a type of firewall which involves slightly modifying the packets of network traffic as they traverse the device. All routers include some kind of user interface for configuring how the router will treat traffic. The really large routers include the equivalent of a full-blown programming language to describe how they should operate as well as the ability to communicate with other routers to describe or determine the best way to get network traffic from point A to point B.

Regards,

Shiva Shankar N.

[shivashankar]

<B>Explain how traceroute works (explain incrementing the TTL field)</B>

The "traceroute" program uses ICMP messaging and the time to live (TTL) field in the IP header. It works by sending a packet to the intended host with a TTL value of 1. The first router will send back the ICMP "time exceeded" message to the sending host. Then the traceroute program will send a message with a TTL of 2, then 3, etc. This way it will get information about each router using the information received in the ICMP packets. To get information about the receiving host, the message is sent to a port that is not likely to be serviced by that host. A ICMP "port unreachable" error message is generated and sent back.

Regards,

Shiva Shankar N.