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 P- 870HN-51D 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 P- 870HN-51D 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 P-870HN-51D has a built-in DHCP server capability that assigns IP addresses and DNS servers to systems that support DHCP client capability.

DHCP Relay

You can also configure the P-870HN-51D to relay client DHCP requests to a DHCP server and the server’s responses back to the clients.

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.

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P-870HN-51D User’s Guide