Chapter 7 LAN Setup

7.1.2 What You Need To Know About LAN

IP Address

IP addresses identify individual devices on a network. Every networking device (including computers, servers, routers, printers, etc.) needs an IP address to communicate across the network. These networking devices are also known as hosts.

Subnet Mask

Subnet masks determine the maximum number of possible hosts on a network. You can also use subnet masks to divide one network into multiple sub-networks.

DHCP

A DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server can assign your ZyXEL Device an IP address, subnet mask, DNS and other routing information when it's turned on.

RIP

RIP (Routing Information Protocol) allows a router to exchange routing information with other routers.

Multicast

Traditionally, IP packets are transmitted in one of either two ways - Unicast (1 sender - 1 recipient) or Broadcast (1 sender - everybody on the network). Multicast delivers IP packets to a group of hosts on the network - not everybody and not just 1.

IGMP

IGMP (Internet Group Multicast Protocol) is a network-layer protocol used to establish membership in a Multicast group - it is not used to carry user data. There are three versions of IGMP. IGMP version 2 and 3 are improvements over version 1, but IGMP version 1 is still in wide use.

DNS

DNS (Domain Name System) is for mapping a domain name to its corresponding IP address and vice versa. The DNS server is extremely important because without it, you must know the IP address of a networking device before you can access it.

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P-660HN-T1H User’s Guide