What is Ethernet

One of the many, many things that cracks me up by being a network technician is
that normal people, just regular users, throw around a lot of high tech terminology
without really understanding what it's all about.

We hear people throw out terms like TCP/IP or Wi-Fi, and they may or may not really
understand it, but they like to throw it out anyway.

The one term that drives me absolutely bonkers that I hear people use all the time
is ethernet.

You'll hear folks say things like, oh, here, I got an ethernet cable, or look at my
little Soho Ethernet switch, or oh, look, ethernet fiber optic. On the back of just
about every computer around is a network connection, and people go, oh that's my
ethernet connection.

Well that's one of those terms that's kind of right, but really basically wrong.

So what I want to do right now is clarify the term, ethernet. If you want to
understand ethernet, you need to understand that a long time ago, way back in 1980,
a bunch of people got together with the IEEE.

This is the big US standards board, and they came together and they created a
standard called IEEE 802.3.

Now IEEE 802.3, which we call Ethernet, is a book.

And inside this book is everything you need to know to make a network called
ethernet.

Inside here is what kind of cables to use.

Inside here is how fast does it run.

Inside here is what type of frame is it going to use.

Inside here is how do you sense and how do you communicate together. I mean
everything you need to know to make a network is in this one book.

Now this was developed way back in February of 1980, 802.

So the 802.3 standard has gone through a lot of changes since way back then. We
have things
like, oh I don't know, 802.3a and 802.3 B and 802.3i and they actually ran out of
letters of the
alphabet and they had to start at the beginning, so they have things like 802.3ae.

And I mean if I wanted to show you all of the addendums to the 802.3 standard this
thing would stack up, well, probably about 100 yards over my head.

So I don't want to do that. For right now, what we need to appreciate is that
Ethernet, at least in terms of one piece, never really changes.

And that's right here in the frame. The ethernet frame has stayed the same since
pretty much from the beginning.

Now there's going to be some nerd out there who's like, well Mike, there were
earlier version of ethernet, but they haven't been around since, I don't know,
since I was listening to Whams!, so we ignore those people, and if they say that to
you, punch them.

So the bottom line, is that we have this little ethernet frame.

Now we've talked about frames earlier, so what I want to add at this point, is that
ethernet lives on MAC addresses, so it has the MAC address to the MAC address from.

There's going to be some amount of data, and there's a CRC, but when we're talking
about ethernet, we call this the frame check sequence or FCS.

So this is the base frame.

Now in later episodes we're going to add a lot to this.

This frame normally will never be more than 1500 bytes.

So this can get a lot bigger, well at least in terms of ones and zeros, but the
bottom line is, is that unless you're doing something weird it's never going to go
over 5300 bytes.

OK.

Now if you understand that the frame doesn't change, then some cool things can be
thought about. For example, in the ethernet world it's trivial for us to take a
very modern network card and make it easily backward compatible with older
equipment.

All we have to do is slow down the card because the frame never changes.

Or if you have an ethernet network that uses fiber optic, it's not that big of a
deal to connect it to a unshielded twisted pair just by using little media
converters because the frame never changes, and that's a big deal.

Now given that the frame doesn't change you, do appreciate that ethernet has gone
through a lot of changes over the years since 1980.

It started out with big thick wire and now it's down to unshielded twisted pair or
fiber optic.

It started out at 10 megabits per second and now it's going 10 gigabits per second.

So when we talk about these different types of ethernet we have a standard

nomenclature and I want to show that to you right now.

So if you take a look here is an example of a standard nomenclature for one of

those versions of 802.3, and this one says 10Base5.

So let's break this down.

On the far left hand side, what we're looking at is the speed in megabits per
second.

So this can be 10.

This could be a hundred.

This could be a thousand.

It could be more than that.

Let's stick with those three for right now.

In the center, that value is either going to be base or broad. Broadband is

ethernet that runs kind of like cable television where you have channels and so you
have one piece of cable that's running lots and lots of different conversations at
once.

But the more, vastly more common version is base, and when you see the word "base,"
that means that the entire bandwidth, however are you want to look at it, there's
only one channel. Everything that's being used is to send one conversation at a
time.

So let's go and set this to something.

I don't know.

How about 10 base.

There we go.

So the last value, this one's a little bit weird.

Back in the old days of ethernet before we had switches laying around, what we
would do is we would just have this big long cable and you would hook into this
cable, we actually have to know this for Network+, and the length of that cable was
that last value.

So if you saw five, that stood for five hundred meters, and that's a little bit
old, but still in Net+.

Today pretty much the only value you're going to see there is T.

So if we see something like 10 base T, what we're talking about is that it runs at
10megabits per second, it's baseband, and it uses unshielded twisted pair with a
switch in the middle.

So for the exam make sure that you're comfortable with these different types of
nomenclatures.

Because you're going to be seeing them all over the place.

Ethernet is defined by the IEEE 802.3 standard

The IEEE has defined many versions of Ethernet

For the test, be able to recognize the Ethernet naming syntax

Ethernet Basics

We've been talking about the concept of frame for a while and what I want to do in
this episode is break down the most important frame type there is, an Ethernet
frame. Since Ethernet is so dominant out there I feel this is the best one for us
to break down.

Now I might want to add there are other types of data that have other types of
frames.
However, ninety nine percent of all the data that moves on the internet moves on
ethernet.

So this is the best one to start with.

So, one of the things that really separates the sheep from the goats as it were, in
the world of networking are the people who really understand how to break frames
down and those who don't.

Not only is it important for the exam but this would be the common banter that
network nerds would be tossing back and forth to each other, and more importantly
in other episodes we actually use tools that grab these frames and allow us to
analyze them and you've got to know how a frame is structured to be able to use
those tools.

Are you sufficiently motivated?

Good.

Let's go ahead and get started.

So what I have you're using my blocks is an Ethernet frame. Now of course this is
going to be nothing more than a big old string of ones and zeros, but the blocks
represent certain chunks of those ones and zeros in terms of what they do.

So we're going to start way over here on the left and march all the way to the
right. Starting here on the left is what we call the preamble.

Now if a network card is plugged into a piece of wire, how does it know a frame is
coming? And that's the job of the preamble.

So the preamble is nothing more than a bunch of alternating ones and zeros. So it's
like mema mema mema mema.

Here comes a frame. So the network card wakes up, pulls out his baseball catcher's
mitt and starts grabbing the rest of the frame as it comes in.

So that's the preamble.

Now the next and this is the destination MAC address.

So, we have to have some kind of addressing to know where it's going and that's
what that carries right there.

So that's a 48 bit MAC address that's built into every network card in the
universe.

After that it's going to be the source back address.

Now if you're going to be sending somebody data there's probably a good chance that
they might want to return something back to you.

So by giving them the return address, whoever you're sending stuff to knows where
it came from and then they can send something back if they need to.

Now right here is what we call data type.

In fact if you want to be more technically correct we would call this the ether
type.
What this little guy is doing, and he's only about 2 bytes long, and his job is to
let us know what kind of data we're hauling.

So he'll have values like 0800 for example means that I'm sending IPV4 data or
there's IPV6
or ARP. All of these different things are discussed in other episodes so don't
worry if you don't know what those are yet.

Next as the data itself.

Now the data is kind of an interesting thing. Because you have a minimum amount of
data that you can haul and a maximum amount of data.

So within the world of Ethernet you can haul about 64 bytes, and by the way we
don't even use the word bytes when we're talking about this stuff we use the word
octets. A byte and an octet is still 8 bits OK.

But sometimes you'll see the word octet instead of byte.

Don't worry about it.

Same thing.

So the minimum amount of data it can haul is 64 bytes.

If by some chance you're hauling just a little tiny piece of data. Like you're
saying,
"OK got it."

Which doesn't mean that much to anybody else.

We're going to add something called a pad.

Now the pad pushes this up to the absolute minimum size.

So if you've got a tiny little bit of data, you add a pad to get it to 64.

Now on the maximum side, and this is also very important, the maximum amount that
you can haul is about 1522 bytes or octets. That's interesting to me because, come
on we watch YouTube videos right?

We're doing online gaming.

I'm buying a whole bunch of new barbecue stuff at E-Bay, whatever it might be.

So we got a lot more than 1522 bytes of data sometimes. That's absolutely true.

And there's no problem.

All we do is just send a bunch. We just chop up whatever chunk of data you got into
nice 1522 bite pieces and we got something in here called a sequencing number. So
like every get like 30 boxes, it'll say box 1 of 30, 2 of 30, 3 of 30 kind of
thing.

We have the same thing built in the networking and it takes care of all that for us
automatically.

So 1522 bytes or octets is the most data that you can haul within one individual
frame.

However, with some of the more advanced types of Ethernet that we're seeing today
they have something called a jumbo frame. A jumbo frame is unique and it's only for
really high speed stuff, but it can push one individual frame up to be able to haul
as much as 9000 bytes. So jumbo frames do come into play but only for very high
speed networks.

So, this value, the maximum amount of data we can haul is known as an MTU or
maximum transmission unit.

All right.

As you might imagine it might be a job for a frame to go from one host and through
some wires and through some boxes and through some more wires and who knows what
else that before it gets to the other host.

In that time period things can happen.

We could have lightning strike, or wires get cut, or people start turning on
blowdryers, or anything that could actually degrade that signal.

So the last thing we do with any type of ethernet frame is this guy right here on
the end.

This is called the frame check sequence.

The frame check sequence is what we call a 32 bit cyclic redundancy check. Which is
basically groovey binary mathematics that says to us, if you check this value out
do some math and if you don't get this value then something's wrong.

And then whoever gets is going to go sorry it's messed up.

Please resend.

So these are the main chunks of every Ethernet frame that are out there.

It's important that you take the time to memorize each one of these and have a
basic understanding of what they do. Not only for the exam but for real world
network troubleshooting.

Ethernet frames consist of a preamblem destination MAS, source MAC, data type,
data, pad, and FCS

a jumbo frame can carry 9000 bytes

FCS is ued for error detection