First and foremost, TCP/IP is not a single protocol, but a term used to define the family of protocols in use on the Internet. The individual protocols in the TCP/IP suite are very specific in function, ranging from the mundane task of providing a simple transport service, to the more esoteric function of transmitting the graphical pages found on the World Wide Web.
NetWare only has a few protocols that are "standard". Vendors that develop fax or e-mail servers that run over IPX develop their own proprietary protocols for these services. However, standard TCP/IP protocols exist for a wide variety of services. There are protocols that are used for sharing files and printers (like with NetWare), protocols for publishing HTML pages over the World Wide Web, protocols for sending and receiving electronic mail over the Internet, and many others. By having standard protocols for a variety of application-specific services, TCP/IP is much more flexible than other protocol families like IPX, but it is also quite a bit larger, and many times it is also less efficient.
TCP/IP was not designed for the small networks that IPX was designed for, but instead was designed for world-wide networks of a tremendous scale and variety. For example, IPX networks use SAP tables to record and publish ever-changing lists of servers and resources on the local network. This works extremely well on a small network with no more than a few hundred devices. However, it would not work on the global Internet with its millions of nodes. The SAP status messages needed to keep the network working would flood the Internet to a point where it became unusable for anything else.
Another important aspect of TCP/IP is the issue of "openness". While NetWare and other LAN products (including Microsoft's Windows NT and Apple’s offerings) all use proprietary protocols for sharing resources, the TCP/IP family of protocols are in the public domain and usable by anyone. Proposals for new specifications can be offered by anybody (even you), and the technology adoption process is executed in full sight. Thus, many companies already offer integrated TCP/IP protocols and services in their products.
These three elements (scalability, flexibility and openness) make TCP/IP an attractive choice for users in mixed environments. They can run the same protocols and services on almost all of their host and client systems. For this reason, many customers have made TCP/IP a check-off item for network purchases, and are deploying TCP/IP-based applications and services across their internal networks, and are also using it for their external connections.
Figure A.10 below shows the major protocols in the TCP/IP suite.
Figure A.10: The TCP/IP protocol suite.
This section only deals with TCP/IP in a cursory manner. For a more detailed explanation on TCP/IP, refer to Appendix B: TCP/IP In Depth. For more information on the IP protocol, refer to section 1 Internet Protocol (IP) and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). For more information on TCP and UDP, refer to section 2 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and section 3 IP Sockets and Ports. For more information on IP routing, refer to section 4 Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). For more information on name resolution services, refer to section 5 HOSTS Files and the Domain Name Service (DNS). For more information on TCP/IP’s mail protocols, refer to Appendix D: SMTP and POP3 Mail.
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