Compatible Systems 5.4 Manuale Utente

Pagina di 313
Appendices
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When a device on the network attempts to discover services (such as servers 
or printers) using a Chooser program, an NBP (Name Binding Protocol) 
lookup packet is sent to a router on the same segment, which then performs a 
lookup in its tables to determine the network number(s)/range(s) for a partic-
ular zone. These tables are maintained using the ZIP (Zone Information 
Protocol).
The lookup is then forwarded to the appropriate segment(s). Devices whose 
services match the information in the lookup will respond to it, and the 
response will be forwarded back to the original machine.
Router Autoconfiguration
An autoseeding default router configuration simplifies administration of 
routers since AppleTalk can be routed right out of the box without any addi-
tional configuration.
To determine a network number to use for autoseeding, a router listens to the 
network for several RTMP periods, and then examines its routing table 
(which is filled in with information from RTMP packets), and picks an 
unused number for each interface. Only Phase 2 extended networking is 
turned on in the default configuration, with network ranges of 1.
A default zone name is created for each interface that incorporates the 
router’s Ethernet address, which is guaranteed to be unique.
Bridging 101
v Note:  This is a very brief introduction to the concept of bridging networks. 
For more in-depth information, there are a variety of references, including 
the IEEE 802.3d spanning tree specification. A good general purpose refer-
ence is Radia Perlman’s Interconnections (Addison-Wesley Publishing).
Bridging Basics
Bridges are used to limit the amount of traffic appearing on network segments 
other than the destination segment. They do not provide for the logical 
grouping of network devices, which makes them considerably less flexible 
than routers from the standpoint of network management.
In contrast to routers, bridges operate on the “physical” network layer. While 
protocols such as IP or IPX are concerned with their own addressing schemes 
and routing tables (see IP 101 or IPX 101), bridging is only concerned with 
physical (i.e. Ethernet) addresses, and which bridge interface they are 
located on.