As we discussed all the way back in Chapter 1, Networks in a Nutshell, a network is a system that is agnostic of the participants of that system. Any given network has no knowledge of the entities or hosts that are wired up to it. As such, it can give no such information to any new hosts that try to connect to it. Instead, those hosts are responsible for broadcasting information about themselves out to others. Not only that, they're responsible for listening for broadcast information coming from other hosts so that they might know what other resources or hosts are on their network. So, how exactly does this happen?
Network resources and topography
Node-to-node communication
In just about all of the host-to-host interactions...