Network Basics: Knowledge Checks
21.1 What This Check Covers
This assessment consolidates the Network Basics sequence that immediately precedes it. It checks message paths, shared-medium choices, protocol-layer responsibilities, packet tracing, and the limits of diagnostic evidence.
You are not expected to know IPv6 design, subnet arithmetic, NAT, detailed TCP or UDP behaviour, radio propagation, LoRaWAN, or Wi-Fi channel planning yet. Those topics appear in later chapters. If an answer seems to require one of them, return to the evidence already available at the link, route, handoff, and service boundaries.
A successful observation proves only the boundary it exercised. A working local link does not prove a route, a route does not prove a transport exchange, and a transport exchange does not prove that the application accepted fresh data.
21.2 Check the Packet Path
21.3 Check Medium Access
21.4 Check Protocol Responsibilities
21.5 Review and Continue
You are ready to continue when you can trace a packet without treating every wrapper as the same object, select a medium-access candidate from evidence rather than a brand name, and stop a diagnosis at the first unproved boundary.
Continue to IPv4 Addressing Fundamentals, where addresses, masks, local reachability, and gateway forwarding become explicit.