[Discussion of increasing past subnet size and the possibility that
the address-wise adjacent subnet isn't available, and that subnet
masks must be continuous elided.]
Can any of the truly IP.aware comment on the scheme below?
IIUC, it is perfectly possible to have two separate subnets on
the same ethernet. It's just that a pair of machines on separate
subnets can't directly communicate. There needs to be a router (or
should I be saying gateway) between the subnets to let them talk, and
the packets will pass on the ether twice: once from source to router;
once from router to destination. This is a waste, but if as
separately theorized, this is for a dorm, the vast majority of the
traffic will be going out the main gateway to the rest of the edu
domain and the internet at large. Careful partitioning of machines
across the two subnets so that any pairs that do actually communicate
a lot are on the same subnet can further reduce the unnecessary
retransmission overhead.
Certainly the router that routes between the two subnets could
have two net.cards on the same ether, but it may even be possible to
have two logical interfaces, each with their own IP address and
netmask, run through a single physical card (nothing in the hardware
to stop it).
A remaining make or break question is can the gateway to
places not on the ether, which is possibly some commercial and rigidly
configured box (or under the authority of rigid and less than
brilliant network administrators) be configured to route packets for
the two disjoint subnets to the same network interface. If so, then a
bonus question is whether it could be the inter-subnet gateway.
Bill
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