TCP/IP Part 5

This is the final installment in my series of blog posts on TCP/IP which are based on what I learn doing an Infinite Skills training video. In this blog post I am mostly looking at wireless networking with a little on IPV4 & IPV6. There is a program called H Ping that is a good packet creator software. There is a type of network attack called a Fraggle attack and is similar to a smurf attack except the former uses UDP where as the latter uses TCP. Both types try to flood the server on a large network with loads of data from every client computer. Both types of attack are very rare nowadays because network hardware has advanced to a point where they are well prepared for it. 802.11 is the protocol for wireless networking which comes in versions, a, b, g, n & ad. Funnily enough b is the slowest and if you broadcast on 5 GHz and not 2.4 GHz you are less likely to find a signal clash with other devices. inSSiDer 2 is a windows program that lets you set up a wireless connection easily. Generally any wireless device will scan for available networks when you set it up and let you choose one. WPA is better than WEP for encrypting documents to send by wireless and there is a WPA 2 which is better still. If you send unencrypted messages anyone with a wireless receiver can read them. WPA & WPA 2 use a shared key for the messages to be read going both ways. A network should always be password and the users having their own passwords. IPV6 uses 8 groups of hexadecimal numbers and is far superior to it's parent IPV4. IPV4 is in danger of not supporting enough computers as each has to be individually numbered and it only reaches around 4 billion. IPV6 is highly unlikely to ever reach its limits which is a huge number. IPV4 uses multi-casting to send the same message to several recipients. IPV6 does it with in the program. It also lets you send much bigger amounts of data although this is limited by your broadband connection.