Skip to main content

Understanding Networking

Concepts and explanations for networking topics relevant to Brainboxes Ethernet devices.

📄️ What is a MAC Address

A Media Access Control or MAC address, is a unique hardware identification tag built into every networkable device. It is used primarily to identify a device among others on a network as its tag is unique to the device but is also used in the MAC sub-layer of Layer 2 in the OSI model (the Data Link layer) to move data packets from one network interface card (NIC) to another. This ensures signals sent from different nodes across the network do not collide. As the MAC address is hardwired into the device during production it cannot be changed. MAC addresses use the same Hexadecimal characters as IPv6 addresses, although its format is much different with each address comprising of 6 - 2 character sets, separated by colons.

📄️ What is a Router?

A Router, much like a switch, is a piece of network hardware that 'routes' data across networks and the internet, hence its name. It is responsible for sending packets of data across a network, it does this by forwarding the packets between multiple routers using a routing protocol. Generally, a router is connected to multiple data lines, and when a router receives inbound data, it reads the header of the data packet. This contains the ultimate destination of the data, and then using a routing table, calculates the best route for the packet to take based on the information stored in its routing table. This occurs at every router between the original sender and the destination router.