ZyXEL Communications P-660RU-Tx User Manual

Chapter 8 LAN Setup

P-660RU-Tx User’s Guide

Subnet masks determine the maximum number of possible hosts on a network. 
You can also use subnet masks to divide one network into multiple sub-networks.

A DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server can assign your P-660RU-Tx 
an IP address, subnet mask, DNS and other routing information when it's turned 
on.

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

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 three versions of IGMP. IGMP version 2 is an improvement over version 
1, but IGMP version 1 is still in wide use. IGMP version 3 supports source filtering, 
reporting or ignoring traffic from specific source address to a particular host on the 
network.

DNS (Domain Name System) is for mapping 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 networking device before you can 
access it.

 for technical background information on LANs.