Fluke 2680A User Manual page 250

2680A/2686A
Users Manual
3. Will all the routers route IP packets?
4. What are my domain and host names (optional)?
The minimum information you need to get is the IP Addresses for the PC and the
instruments. If your network contains more than one subnet and you want to place
the PC and one or more instruments in different subnets, you must also set the
default gateway address and subnet mask on both the 2680 Series instrument and
the PC.
The PC may use DHCP to get an IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway
address automatically on the network.
Your Network Administrator may also need to know the Ethernet addresses of the
PC Ethernet adapter and each 2680 Series instrument that you will attach to the
network. Obtain the Ethernet address of the PC by running the hardware setup
program supplied with the adapter hardware. Obtain the address of the 2680 Series
instruments by using the front panel controls.
Read Network Primer for more information on IP addressing and the other
information needed to operate 2680 Series on a general network.
Network Primer
In the early days of computer networking, vendors used many proprietary
communication schemes. These forced users to purchase equipment and software
from one or a few companies. As networking became more popular, users placed
pressure on vendors to establish standards to allow interoperation of various types
of computers, operating system software, and interface hardware.
One of these standardization efforts was started by the DARPA agency of the U.S.
Defense department. Another was headed up by the DEC and Xerox companies.
This effort resulted in the Ethernet wiring and low-level protocol scheme. The
DARPA effort resulted in the TCP/IP high-level protocols. Ethernet became an
international standard by the efforts of the IEEE-802.3 committee. TCP/IP is the
protocol used on the international Internet Network and is supported by consensus
of the users of that network (many thousands of hosts).
The Sockets API was developed at U.C. Berkeley and was widely adopted by the
UNIX community to support direct Host-to-Host communication within a TCP/IP
network. WINSOCK is an MS Windows Dynamic Link Library (DLL) version of
the original UNIX Sockets library and has been standardized by a large number of
PC Software and Hardware Vendors. WINSOCK has been included with Windows
since the introduction of Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.
To reduce the complexity of network schemes and to encourage interoperation
between varieties of networks, the protocols are built up of several layers that are
isolated from each other by well-described interfaces. Usually, the lowest layers of
the protocol are implemented in hardware logic on the interface circuits used by
H-2