What You Need To Know About Lan - ZyXEL Communications P-2612HW-F1 User Manual

Chapter 7 LAN Setup

7.1.2 What You Need To Know About LAN

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.
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.
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-2612HW-F1 User's Guide