Survey of Common Services

There are a variety of network services available on UNIX machines. Most are independent of UNIX, and may be used across the Internet. Below is a listing of common services: You can use the following commands as per your UNIX operating systems to start or stop networking service.

• HP-UX Unix start / stop / restart networking service

  # /sbin/init.d/net stop
  # /sbin/init.d/net start
  # /sbin/init.d/hostname start
  

• Trivial Services
  TCP/IP offers a host of very simple services that are useful for debugging. Often, no server processes are associated to these servers. Instead, the kernel handles the service directly. Two of the most useful trivial services are:
  
  1. echo, which simply repeats back whatever you type to it
  2. daytime, which reports, in human-readable form, the machine's idea of the current date and time

(TCP/IP) is a protocol system, a collection of protocols that supports network communications. The answer to the question

What is a protocol?

must begin with the question

What is a network?

This module describes what a network is and shows why networks need protocols. You will also learn what TCP/IP is, what it does, and where it began (and the answer is not Al Gore.) At the completion of this module, you will be able to

1. Define the term network
2. Explain what a network protocol suite is
3. Explain what TCP/IP is
4. Discuss the of TCP/IP
5. List some important features of TCP/IP
6. Identify the organizations that oversee TCP/IP and the Internet
7. Explain what RFCs are and where to find them

A network is a collection of computers or computer-like devices that can communicate across a common transmission medium.
Often the transmission medium is an insulated metal wire that carries electrical pulses between the computers, but the transmission medium could also be a phone line, or even no line at all in the case of a wireless network. Regardless of how the computers are connected, the communication process requires that data from one computer pass across the transmission medium to another computer. Computer A must be able to send a message or request to computer B. Computer B must be able to understand the message of computer A and respond to it by sending a message back to computer A.

DNS, or the Domain Name Service, provides Internet-wide conversion between IP addresses and host names. In the services file, it is called domain. The well-known port number is 53 which is where AWS gets its name for Route 53. The daemon process is called named, in.named or bind.

• (TLD) Top-Level Domain
  A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System^[1] of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is com, or COM, as domain names are not case-sensitive. Management of most top-level domains is delegated to responsible organizations by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and is in charge of maintaining the DNS root zone.
• Domain Name System (DNS):
  The basic function of DNS is to resolve user-friendly domain names into IP addresses. When a client enters a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), the DNS server is queried for the IP address of the corresponding server. DNS is the tool most commonly used to find resources on large IP networks such as the Internet. While DNS has been working as the main name-resolution service on the Internet for quite some time, it does have a few weaknesses. For our discussion, we will look first at how DNS is structured, then at a few of its weak points. Before the Internet was created, there existed a network known as the ARPAnet. This network tied together a few university and Department of Defense sites so that they could share research material. Since the network was small, each computer on the net had a small text file, known as a hosts file, that listed a user-friendly name for each host (computer) and its IP address. When another host was added to a site, the hosts file on each computer that might need to communicate with the new computer was updated with its address.
  As an example, suppose that two networks were tied to this network: 1. CPlusOOP and 2. GOFPattern
  Each of these networks has five hosts that must be accessed across the network. The hosts file for each client device must include a "friendly name" and the IP address of all 10 hosts. A sample hosts file is shown in Table 3.11.

Without DNS we would be lost in navigating websites. For many enterprises, choosing a robust DNS solution can be a challenging task. This module focuses on how to design an enterprise-friendly DNS solution using BIND. BIND is an open source DNS implementation that has become the de facto reference implementation ( www.isc.org/downloads/bind).
(BIND) stands for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, because the software was developed at the University of California at Berkeley during the early 1980s. Currently, the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) maintains BIND. There are two branches of BIND:

1. one is 9.x and,
2. 9.10.0-P2

is the current stable release in this branch.

• BIND10
  The other branch is BIND10, release 1.2. BIND10 has, however, been renamed to Bundy (http://bundy-dns.de/) because the ISC has concluded its work on BIND10 and is no longer updating the source pool. Because BIND 9 is much more widely used, the ISC has decided to focus on BIND 9 and not on BIND10 anymore. In this chapter we look at BIND 9.x, which is the more popular version of BIND. For an enterprise, the choice of which solution to use (BIND 9.x or BIND10) depends on whether the enterprise wants ISC support with the software. Because the ISC is focusing on BIND 9.x, and not on BIND10, 9.x might be a more suitable option if you want support from the ISC. (DHCP) Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is tied closely to DNS because DHCP provides network devices with an IP address, which often needs to be updated in a DNS namespace. Many enterprises use DHCP and often struggle to update DHCP-assigned IP addresses in DNS. In both cases, of DNS and DHCP, I assume you have a good understanding of how the protocol works.

The (NNTP) Network News Transfer Protocol is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley authored RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986.
Usenet was originally designed based on the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers, which were powerful time-sharing systems. Readers and posters logged into these computers reading the articles directly from the local disk. As local area networks and Internet participation proliferated, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers connected to local networks. The resulting protocol was NNTP, which resembled the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) but was tailored for exchanging newsgroup articles. A newsreader, also known as a news client, is a software application that reads articles on Usenet, either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP. The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP and TCP port 433 (NNSP) may be used when doing a bulk transfer of articles from one server to another. When clients connect to a news server with Transport Layer Security (TLS), TCP port 563 is often used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS. Alternatively, a plain-text connection over port 119 may be changed to use TLS via the STARTTLS command.

• Talking to Servers using Telnet
  Here are the steps you needed to follow to successfully complete this exercise:
  
  1. You can use your telnet client to talk directly to many different services. In this exercise, you will work with several trivial TCP/IP services (the echo and daytime ports), then with port 80, which is the one generally used by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). First, telnet to Acme's Web server, using the actual port number for the echo port on that box. Remember: use the number for the port, not the name.
     Solution: telnet www.acmecorp.com 7
  2. Now, enter the following sentence: This is the echo port.
     Solution: This is the echo port.
  3. Press Enter.
     Solution: Enter
     
  4. Notice that the echo port returns exactly the same sentence you entered. Normally, you would end this telnet session by entering Ctrl + ].
     For this simulation, however, the telnet session is closed automatically for you. Note that the terminal reports a ^] signal upon exit. Now, learn the time of day on the West Coast of the United States by telnetting to the daytime port of Acme's Web server. Use the port number, not the name.
     Solution: telnet www.acmecorp.com 13
  5. You should see that the Web server gives the current time. Also, notice that the server drops the connection right after giving you the time. This behavior is standard for the daytime port. You need not issue a termination sequence (e.g., Ctrl + ]) in this case. In addition to the TCP/IP trivial services, you can use telnet to access various servers, including FTP and HTTP. Use telnet to open a connection with the www.acmecorp.com Web server's HTTP port. Use the port number.
     Solution: telnet www.acmecorp.com 80
  6. HTTP servers are not configured to expect human interaction, and therefore do not generate prompts. However, you can still get this server to give you information. For example, you can tell the server to send its default document, as specified by /. To get this information, issue the following command: GET / HTTP/1.0.
     Note: you must enter this command exactly as shown, so include the proper spacing.
     Solution: GET / HTTP/1.0
  7. Press Enter twice to create two blank lines that direct the Web server to transfer its information.
     Solution: Enter, Enter
  8. Note that the server will terminate the telnet connection immediately, because the server initiates a connection, then ends it as soon as the information is sent.

[1] Domain Name System (DNS): The Domain Name System (DNS) is like a phonebook for the internet, translating human-friendly website names like google.com into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to communicate. This allows users to easily access websites by typing in memorable names instead of complex strings of numbers.