Types of Network

PAN: Personal Area Network

Is a very small network that interconnects two devices, for example a gaming controller, connected to your PC.

LAN: Local Area Network

Usually a network local to a building, or maybe an area within a building. For a example a network within a department to share resources like a printer.

CAN: Campus Area Network

Connects nearby buildings, each of them have a LAN within a building.

MAN: Metropolitan Area Network

Some businesses have multiple locations, spread across a large metropolitan area, allows business offices to connect to a MAN and those offices can communicate with one another at a very high speed.

WAN: Wide Area Network

Interconnects networks over a large geographical regions, maybe all over the country or different countries around the world.

VPN Virtual Private Network

VPN can encrypt the data flowing over an internet connection. Virtually private network even though our data is flowing over the public internet.

Addresses

We have two types of addresses physical and logical. Physical addresses or burned in addresses are called

Physical Addresses

MAC addresses and are 48bit addresses. The first half of the address is the vendor code or OUI (Organizationally Unique identifier)

Logical Addresses

IP Addresses (Internet Protocol) an address that needs to be assigned to the device instead of coded into the hardware by the manufacturer. There are two types of ip addresses IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. .

IPv4 address is 32bit address. The dividing line that separates the network part from the the host is the subnet mask

IPv4 is a 32bit address that gives us 2 ^ 32 total addresses. IPv6 is a 128bit address which gives us a total of 2^128 addresses.