Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!uflorida!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!sean From: sean@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Sean McLinden) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Subnet questions. Message-ID: <1594@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> Date: 7 Oct 88 13:07:41 GMT References: <8810031020.AA02610@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Reply-To: sean@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Sean McLinden) Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA. Lines: 23 In article ron@ron.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) writes: >If your campus is connected together by datalink bridges rather than >routers, you are not really subnetting. You are just imposing a scheme >for assigning numbers. Unless, of couse, within these buildings you have hosts which are attached to multiple networks (such as a local NFS net or PC net). Then you'll want to run with subnetworks (in fact, you almost have to). >Leave the hosts thinking they are using an unsubnetted >class B network (which is what they are doing). You can still assign the >more significant byte to be the building number and the least significant >one to be the host number. That way if you ever do get smart and get >routers, you will already be ready to subnet. You will avoid having >to renumber everything. We have a similar thing at the University of Pittsburgh. The problems start when someone wants to run subnets which will allow all hosts on any net to talk to each other. My personal experience echoes Ron's suggestion. If you even think that you MIGHT someday want to subnet somewhere, plan for it now. It really does make life easier in the future. Sean McLinden