Understanding OSI Model

Hey fellas!

Before we dive into the layers of the OSI model, let’s take a real quick analogy to help us understand what an IP address and a MAC address actually are.

I mean, what the heck are these two terms that you’ve probably heard somewhere or at some point, right?

So, imagine mailing a package across the country.
Let’s say you're sending a package from New York City to your friend who lives in Los Angeles. You see, the IP address is like the full mailing address, It tells the system both where the package needs to go and where it’s coming from. In our analogy, your mailing address and your friend’s mailing address are the IP addresses of your device and your friend’s device. Here, It’s all about getting the data to the final destination, no matter how many networks it has to pass through.

But along the way, the package passes through several post offices (or we say routers in our networking world), and at each one, it needs to be handed off to the right delivery person and that’s where the MAC address comes in. A MAC address is like a name tag stuck on your device’s network card. It’s unique to each device and helps deliver data within the same local network, you know like from one device to the next, one step (or “hop”) at a time. So it handles the hop-to-hop delivery from one stop to the next until it reaches the final destination.

Bottom line, when a message is being sent, the IP address helps guide it across the whole internet to reach it’s final destination, and at each step, the MAC address makes sure it reaches the right machine within that specific network.