2 Network Devices
This chapter covers
- The definition of a network
- Types of network devices, including clients, servers, switches, routers, and firewalls
This chapter is a high-level introduction to networks and some of the different types of devices that comprise them. After looking at what a network is, we will examine clients, servers, switches, routers, and firewalls. We will look at the basic roles of each of these types of devices in a network, but we won’t get into any details about how they actually perform these roles - we’ve got the rest of the book to do that! By the end of this chapter you will be able to identify each of the network devices in figure 2.1, and briefly explain their respective roles.
Figure 2.1 An enterprise network connecting multiple offices together over the Internet
Each office in figure 2.1 is a Local Area Network (LAN), a group of interconnected devices in a limited area such as an office. Within each office in the diagram you can find the kinds of network devices we will look at in this chapter: clients, servers, switches, routers, and firewalls. The connection between offices is called a Wide Area Network (WAN) – a network that extends over a large geographical area (such as between cities). There are lots of WAN connection types that we will cover in this book. The Internet, as represented by the cloud icon in figure 2.1, is just one of the options for connecting remote locations together.