Can Anyone explain what is ment by IP Mapping, ive searched everywhere and can not get any info on this all i found was this, but it dont make sense to me - http://www.fractalus.com/steve/stuff/ipmap

Any Help at all?

In what context do you mean that "IP mapping" thing? You are talking about NAT maybe?

Like I said above IP mapping, im trying to understand what IP mapping means...

Where did you hear that term from? Since it returns only a handful of results from Google then it is probably slang or a term used wrong.

I think it means establishing a list (map) of the IP-addresses of all hops that a package (of network-data) visits on its merry way from A to B.

Which would be something like tracert or such in the command line

no, i believe he's referring to the 3D mapping of IP addresses. I recall a webpage that has the entire internet mapped as a 3D model. Fairly interesting; it shows the major connections, distances and paths between IPs.

cant think of where I saw it or how you'd google it. If I do I'll post a linkie.

heh, that was easier than I thought....

Internet Mapping Project

I think he means IP Mapping and Name Resolution.

IP Mapping is when a computer builds a table of IP address that have been mapped to a MAC address. IP mapping is what is done when a MAC address needs to be found when only the IP address or domain name is known.

A computer sending information will not know the MAC address of the destination but it will know the IP address of its gateway to the rest of the world. So therefore it will send its data packets to its default gateway. The router at the gateway might not know the MAC address of the destination, but it will send it to the next device in the link. The next device might not know what it is either, but the device after that might or might know where to send it at least, so therefore, the data is sent until its gets to a device that knows the MAC address of the destination, so therefore it removes all the IP address and replaces it in the frame with the MAC address and sends it to the destination.

The same idea applies if for domain names. The domain name may be known but the IP address is not known. Therefore the computer will send a broadcast message asking for the IP address for the domain. The server will look up the domain in its active directory, and sends back the IP address. The computer will then first check its log for the MAC address. If its not there, it will send out another broadcast asking for the MAC address for this IP address it has. Either the server will hand it to the computer, or the computer with the IP address will response with its MAC address.

The process can also be static, not just dnyamic. This means that a DHCP server is not used. This method involves a system administrator manually creating a ‘hosts’ file. This file contains the computer’s name and its corresponding IP address. This method is good when IP addresses are assigned statically, and the network does not change.

Some notes..
Gateways are not used when the destination machine is on the same subnet as the source machine.

The "next device" is determined from a thing called a routing table.
Even though MS would like Active Directory to be all-powerful it is not. No server can know all the domain names of all the hosts on the internet and in most cases the nameserver your computer uses is not an AD DC. There is a hierarchy of DNS servers that are queried one at a time until one is found who can resolve the query.

This is not done by broadcast since broadcasting anything over the whole internet would be a very silly thing to do.
Even if we don't use a DHCP server we can still define a static nameserver instead of writing down the names of all the computers on the internet into the hosts file

The hosts file is a convenient way to name machines on a small network where a dedicated DNS server would be an overkill.

thank you!