Chapter 6 LAN Setup

6.2 What You Need To Know

IP Address

Similar to the way houses on a street share a common street name, so too do computers on a LAN share one common network number. This is known as an Internet Protocol address.

Subnet Mask

The subnet mask specifies the network number portion of an IP address. Your ZyXEL Device will compute the subnet mask automatically based on the IP address that you entered. You don't need to change the subnet mask computed by the ZyXEL Device unless you are instructed to do otherwise.

DHCP

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) allows clients to obtain TCP/IP configuration at start-up from a server. This ZyXEL Device has a built-in DHCP server capability that assigns IP addresses and DNS servers to systems that support DHCP client capability.

RIP

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

Multicast and IGMP

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 (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 two versions 1 and 2. IGMP version 2 is an improvement over version 1 but IGMP version 1 is still in wide use.

DNS

DNS (Domain Name System) maps 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 computer before you can access it. The DNS server addresses you enter when you set up DHCP are passed to the client machines along with the assigned IP address and subnet mask.

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P-870HW-51a v2 User’s Guide