168CHAPTER 5: WORKING WITH THE MAP
discovery. For more information see “There are clouds in my map” on page 141.
■They may be used to separate a link into two halves. This can be useful in situations where you would like to monitor both halves of the link separately. Clouds are used to automatically separate WAN links into two halves, so you can choose to monitor one half of the link, but not the other. For more information see “Monitoring the Network” on pagepage 273 and “Using 3Com Network Director On A
■They may be used to represent logical entities in your network for which no existing icon is appropriate, or to represent sections of the network that are not under your administrative control. For example, you may use a cloud to represent the network that is administered by an ISP.
For more information about adding clouds to the map see “Adding Items to the Map” on page 202.
The label in the center of the cloud indicates the family type of the links that are connected to the cloud. The family type of a link to the cloud is based upon the type of the interface that the other end of the link is connected to. For example, Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and 10 Mbps Ethernet interfaces all belong to the Ethernet family.
It is not necessary for all of the links connected to a cloud to belong to the same family. If they do not then the label in the center of the cloud will be one of three special values as shown in the table below.
Table 20 Special Cloud Values
Label | Description |
|
|
Unknown | The cloud has no links attached. |
WAN | The links attached to the cloud belong to two or more families. All of the |
| families are families that are commonly used for WAN communications. |
Mixed | The links attached to the cloud belong to two or more families. None, or |
| not all, of the families are commonly used for WAN communications. |
|
|
Clouds and Submaps
When you choose to view the devices in your network grouped by subnet, a single cloud can appear in several different submaps and may also appear in the