Chapter 8 LAN Setup

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 P-660RU-Tx 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 is an improvement over version 1, but IGMP version 1 is still in wide use. IGMP version 3 supports source filtering, reporting or ignoring traffic from specific source address to a particular host on the network.

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.

Finding Out More

See Section 8.3 on page 79 for technical background information on LANs.

76

 

P-660RU-Tx User’s Guide