IP, TCP, and UDP

IP Addresses and Domain Names

As a Java programmer, you don't need to worry about the inner workings of IP, but you do need to know about addressing. Every computer on an IPv4 network is identified by a four-byte number. This is normally written in a dotted quad format like 199.1.32.90, where each of the four numbers is one unsigned byte ranging in value from 0 to 255. Every computer attached to an IPv4 network has a unique four-byte address. When data is transmitted across the network, the packet's header includes the address of the machine for which the packet is intended (the destination address) and the address of the machine that sent the packet (the source address). Routers along the way choose the best route to send the packet along by inspecting the destination address. The source address is included so the recipient will know who to reply to. There are a little more than four billion possible IP addresses, not even one for every person on the planet, much less for every computer. To make matters worse, the addresses aren't allocated very efficiently. A slow transition is under way to IPv6, which will use 16-byte addresses. This provides enough IP addresses to identify every person, every computer, and indeed every atom on the planet. IPv6 addresses are customarily written in eight blocks of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons, such as FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210. Leading zeros do not need to be written. A double colon, at most one of which may appear in any address, indicates multiple zero blocks. For example, FEDC:0000:0000:0000:00DC:0000:7076:0010 could be written more compactly as FEDC::DC:0:7076:10. In mixed networks of IPv6 and IPv4, the last four bytes of the IPv6 address are sometimes written as an IPv4 dotted quad address. For example, FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210 could be written as FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:118.84.50.16. IPv6 is only supported in Java 1.4 and later. Java 1.3 and earlier only support four-byte addresses. Although computers are very comfortable with numbers, human beings aren't very good at remembering them. Therefore the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed to translate hostnames that humans can remember (like www.oracle.com) into numeric Internet addresses (like 208.201.239.37). When Java programs access the network, they need to process both these numeric addresses and their corresponding hostnames. Methods for doing this are provided by the java.net.InetAddress class, which is discussed in . Some computers, especially servers, have fixed addresses. Others, especially clients on local area networks and dial-up connections, receive a different address every time they boot up, often provided by a DHCP server or a PPP server. This is not especially relevant to your Java programs. Mostly you just need to remember that IP addresses may change over time, and not write any code that relies on a system having the same IP address. For instance, don't serialize the local IP address when saving app state. Instead, look it up fresh each time your program starts. It's also possible, although less likely, for an IP address to change while the program is running (for instance, if a dialup connection hangs up and then reconnects), so you may want to check the current IP address every time you need it rather than caching it. Otherwise, the difference between a dynamically and manually assigned address is not significant to Java programs.

Ports

Addresses would be all you needed if each computer did no more than one thing at a time. However, modern computers do many different things at once. Email needs to be separated from FTP requests, which need to be separated from web traffic. This is accomplished through ports. Each computer with an IP address has several thousand logical ports (65,535 per transport layer protocol, to be precise). These are purely abstractions in the computer's memory and do not represent anything physical, like a serial or parallel port. Each port is identified by a number between 1 and 65,535. Each port can be allocated to a particular service. For example, HTTP, the underlying protocol of the Web, generally uses port 80. We say that a web server listens on port 80 for incoming connections. When data is sent to a web server on a particular machine at a particular IP address, it is also sent to a particular port (usually port 80) on that machine. The receiver checks each packet it sees for the port and sends the data to any programs that are listening to the specified port. This is how different types of traffic are sorted out. Port numbers between 1 and 1,023 are reserved for well-known services like finger, FTP, HTTP, and IMAP. On Unix systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, only programs running as root can receive data from these ports, but all programs may send data to them. On Windows and Mac OS 9, any program may use these ports without special privileges. Table 2-1 shows the well-known ports for the protocols that are discussed in this tutorial. These assignments are not absolutely guaranteed; in particular, web servers often run on ports other than 80, either because multiple servers need to run on the same machine or because the person who installed the server doesn't have the root privileges needed to run it on port 80. On Unix systems, a fairly complete listing of assigned ports is stored in the file /etc/services.

Table 2-1. Well-known port assignments