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<H2><A NAME="SECTION004430000">Gateways</A></H2>
<A NAME="tcpiproutinggateway"></A>
Subnetting is not only an organizational benefit, it is frequently a
natural consequence of hardware boundaries. The viewpoint of a host on
a given physical network, such as an Ethernet, is a very limited one:
the only hosts it is able to talk to directly are those of the network
it is on. All other hosts can be accessed only through so-called
<em>gateways</em>. A gateway is a host that is connected to two or more
physical networks simultaneously and is configured to switch packets
between them.
<P>
For IP to be able to easily recognize if a host is on a local physical
network, different physical networks have to belong to different
IP-networks. For example the network number 149.76.4.0 is
reserved for hosts on the mathematics LAN. When sending a datagram to
quark, the network software on erdos immediately sees from
the IP-address, 149.76.12.4, that the destination host is on a
different physical network, and therefore can be reached only through
a gateway (sophus by default).
<P>
sophus itself is connected to two distinct subnets: the
Mathematics Department, and the campus backbone. It accesses each
through a different interface, eth0 and fddi0,
respectively. Now, what IP-address do we assign it? Should we give it
one on subnet 149.76.1.0, or on 149.76.4.0?
<P>
The answer is: both. When talking to a host on the Maths LAN,
sophus should use an IP-address of 149.76.4.1, and when
talking to a host on the backbone, it should use 149.76.1.4.
<P>
Thus, a gateway is assigned one IP-address per network it is on. These
addresses--- along with the corresponding netmask--- are tied to the
interface the subnet is accessed through. Thus, the mapping of
interfaces and addresses for sophus would look like this:
<P>
<pre>
----------------------------------------
+-------+-------------+----------------+
|iface | address | netmask |
+-------+-------------+----------------+
+-------+-------------+----------------+
|eth0 | 149.76.4.1 | 255.255.255.0 |
|fddi0 | 149.76.1.4 | 255.255.255.0 |
|lo | 127.0.0.1 | 255.0.0.0 |
+-------+-------------+----------------+
+-------+-------------+----------------+
The last entry describes the loopback interface lo, which was
introduced above.
</pre>
<P>
Figure-<A HREF="node30.html#introfigip"><IMG ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="gif" SRC="cross_ref_motif.gif"></A> shows a part of the network topology at
Groucho Marx University (GMU). Hosts that are on two subnets at the
same time are shown with both addresses.
<P>
<STRONG>Figure:</STRONG>
<A NAME="introfigip"></A>
A part of the net topology at Groucho Marx Univ.
<BR>
<P>
<P>
Generally, you can ignore the subtle difference between attaching an
address to a host or its interface. For hosts that are on one network
only, like erdos, you would generally refer of the host as
having this-and-that IP-address although strictly speaking, it's the Ethernet
interface that has this IP-address. However, this distinction is only
really important when you refer to a gateway.
<P>
<A NAME="1139"></A>
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<P><ADDRESS>
<I>Andrew Anderson <BR>
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996</I>
</ADDRESS>
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