On Sat 19 Jul 2003 at 22:01:11, Yanal Ansouqa said: > I know that routers are used to transfer traffic from two different > networks that use different protocols. i.e. a LAN that used netbeui > connects to a router that connects it to the internet (TCP/IP)
Your definition of a router isn't quite accurate. What you're thinking of is technically called a "gateway." A router passes packets from one subnet to another depending on their destination address. Now in your case, your router also happens to be a gateway, but one is not necessarily the other. Your router is a gateway because it translates TCP/IP running over ethernet to TCP/IP running over PPPoE -- the protocol spoken between your computer and your DSL modem. > Does that mean that on each of the computers in the network, TCP/IP > would not be installed? For some reason that does not sound logical for > me, so what would be an example of traffic that is not tcp/ip that the > router would route to the outside network(internet?) For all practical purposes, every computer on the LAN needs TCP/IP networking installed. It's technically possible to run, say, IPX on your internal LAN and use a gateway to translate it to TCP/IP. However, every single internet app (web browser, email, etc) expects to use TCP/IP, so you need that protocol on every system if you want to get anything done. Unless you specifically configure your router to forward a different protocol over the connection, it won't. For that matter, your ISP probably doesn't support anything but TCP/IP over their network, so it wouldn't do you any good to send IPX packets over your DSL connection. There are some cases where a true gateway is necessary. For instance, I have AT&T DSL, which supports only IPv4. I have IPv6 running on my home LAN, so my gateway/router has to translate the IPv6 packets to IPv4 to send them out over my DSL line. > Lets say that all the computers in the network are Linux boxes :-), and > we used tcp/ip as the protocol. Then we wanted to give interenet access > to the computers in this LAN. So we got a router (does it have to be a > router?). how would the router know if the traffic should be routed to > the outside or if it should stay within the computers of the LAN? Is it > because of the use of a mask or is it the use of LAN ip address that are > different than what is available on the internet? That's pretty close. When you set up a network at home, you give every machine an IP address, a network address, a network mask, and a gateway. The machines figure out whether the destination address is on the local network (using the network address and the netmask), and if the packet's going off the LAN, then it sends it to the router. The router then decides where to send it -- in your case, it will be out your DSL connection. In more compicated cases, the router sometimes has a half dozen interfaces to choose from, depending on where the packet is going. I suggest using the following: network address: 192.168.1.0 netmask: 255.255.255.0 default gateway: 192.168.1.1 broadcast address: 192.168.1.255 other machines: 192.168.1.2 thru 192.168.1.254 Assign the internal network interface on your router the IP address 192.168.1.1, and have all the other machines use that address as the default gateway. Give the other machines addresses between 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.254, and save 192.168.1.255 for what's known as the "broadcast address." > My last question is what is the use of switches and why would > salespeople try to sell that to you instead of a hub for a home network? A switch is only minimally more expensive than a hub, but the performance is *much* better. Unless you're totally strapped for cash, then get a 100 MBit switch. In the long run, you'll be much happier with in than with a 10 MBit hub. -- Soren Harward [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
