Справочник Пользователя для Netopia PN Series

must use the mask issued by the ISP). This, however, is not a 
problematic limitation for your small network.

The advantages to this situation is the greater ease and lower cost 
of obtaining a subnet from an ISP rather than a full Class C address. 

To set up a connection to the Internet, you may have obtained a 
block of IP host addresses from an Internet service provider. When 
configuring the Netopia Router, you gave one of those addresses to 
its Ethernet port, leaving a number of addresses to distribute to 
computers on your network.

There are two schemes for distributing the remaining IP addresses: 

■

Manually give each computer an address 

■

Let the Netopia Router automatically distribute the addresses

These two methods are not mutually exclusive; you can manually 
issue some of the addresses while the rest are distributed by the 
Netopia Router. Using the Router in this way allows it to function as 
an address server.

One reason to use the Netopia Router as an address server is that 
it takes less time than manually distributing the addresses. This is 
particularly true if you have many addresses to distribute. You only 
need to enter information once, rather than having to repeatedly 
enter it on each host separately. This also reduces the potential for 
misconfiguring hosts.

Another reason to use the Netopia Router as an address server is 
that it will only distribute addresses to hosts that need to use them. 
If there is a shortage of addresses, the address server will 
automatically take an address away from a host that has stopped 
using it and give it to a host that is requesting one. If you do not 
possess enough addresses for every host on your network to have 
one at all times, using address serving to distribute them is one 
solution. However, this is not an efficient solution because a host 
without an IP address will be forced to wait until a host with one is 
turned off or gives up its IP address for some other reason.