Configuring Ethernet Network

Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 while at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. (This same innovative place also fostered the invention of the laser printer and the graphical user interface, among other things.) Bob and his team developed and patented a "multipoint data connection system with collision detection" that later became known as Ethernet. Bob went on to form a company specifically dedicated to building equipment for this new protocol. This company eventually became 3Com, one of the largest network companies in the world. Luckily, Ethernet was released into the public domain so other companies could build to the specification. This was not true of Token Ring and most of the other network protocols of the day. If Ethernet had been kept proprietary or limited to only one company's hardware, it probably wouldn't have developed into the dominant standard it is today. It was eventually adopted as an official standard by the International Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which all but assured it wide acceptance by corporate and government users worldwide. Other standards have been developed based on Ethernet, such as Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and Wi-Fi. Ethernet handles both the physical media control and the software encoding for data going onto a network. Since Ethernet is a broadcast topology, where every computer can potentially "talk" at once, it has a mechanism to handle collisions—when data packets from two computers are transmitted at the same time. If a collision is detected, both sides retransmit the data after a random delay. This works pretty well most of the time. However, this is also a downside to the Ethernet architecture. All computers attached to an Ethernet network are broadcasting on the same physical wire, and an Ethernet card on the network sees all the traffic passing it. The Ethernet card is designed to process only packets addressed to it, but you can clearly see the security implication here.