You are in a social situation talking with coworkers, friends, or family members

Question

You are in a social situation talking with coworkers, friends, or family members who are not familiar with the concept of networking, except for the idea that they turn on their computer and surf the World Wide Web (WWW). They ask you to provide a summary of what networking is and what is meant by a peer-to-peer network and a client/server network. Focus your discussion on the following:

• What is networking, and how does it work?

• Illustrate a peer-to-peer network and a client/server network. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Explanation / Answer

Networking and Its Working:

It is a process of connecting two or more devices together for Sharing. Through networking devices can share any information like email, file , documents, resources as printer , internet and storage. The only purpose of networking is sharing. It is there since a long time. The purpose of sharing is as fast as possible and we have use of electical cables, fiber optice and radio signal to acheive it. A network includes atleast two devices to be connected while as a complex network can have thousands of computers connected via different communication links and Internet is the largest communication link we can think of.

Networking is the Construstion, design, a network which consists of physical things like cabling, hub, bridge, switch, router and protocal use for communication and a software for managing the network.

Internet interconnects Millions of computing devices such as PC,Laptop, Server, Smartphone,TabletsmTV, Webcams etc. And these are called hosts or end devices. Whean a computer want to send data to another computer it first initiates a session for transmission and during which both computers finilizes the rules of transmission such as speed,size,security measure,flow control etc. All these rules are called Protocols. During transmission sender breaks the data into small pieces which are called as segments and each segment is properly wrapped with network information. thus the resulting segments are called as packets which are sent to destination computer via network where they are assembled back into the original form.

Peer-to-Peer Versus Client/Server:

In the World of Local Area Network we have two choices of Network Control or we can say we have two types.
One is Peer to Peer and the Other is call Client/Server. The choice of two networks basically tells us the relationshiop each devices on the network has with other.

Peer-to-Peer:

Advantages:
1) Easy and simple to setup which requires a hub or a switch to connect all computers together.
2) Each PC is an Equal Participant on the network.
3) Access to the network is not Centrally controlled.
4) Can operate on basic PC and Operating System
5) Low cost and Simpler
6) More Reliable

Disadvantages:
1) Security is not good other than setting passwords for files.
2) If connections are not setup properly we have problems accessing to files.
3) If we have large number of computers its efficiency decreases.

Client Server:

Advantages:
1) A client server can be scaled up to many services that can also be used by multiple users.
2) Only one PC acts as the network controller
3) Network access and security are centrally controlled
4) Need a special operating system
5) Are Complex but give user more Control.
6) Upgradation and Scalability in Client-server set-up
7) Better Security

Disadvantages:
1) Its Very expensive as compared to Peer-to-Peer
2) When the server goes down or crashes all the computers connected to it become unavailable to use.
3) When every one performs the same task it slows the performance.

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