Message forwarding

A computer in the Computing Department has just been turned on. The user starts up their web browser and requests to see the Macquarie University home page. The home page mq.edu.au resides on a server on the administration subnet.

Describe what happens in getting this request message to the server and how the server gets the response message back to the client.

You should assume (for now, because the MQ network is a bit more complex as will be explained in later lectures) there is one router that connects the Computing network to the Administration network. Each of these networks is a switched LAN.

You should tell the story of the messages, starting from how the browser formats the request, how it progresses through the stack layers. What happens when we get to the Internet layer (since this machine has not contacted the network before)? What happens in the Data Link layer? What does the switch do? What does the router do? What layers are involved at the switch and the router. How does the server stack deliver the packet to the HTTP server software?

This description will probably take between two and four pages