Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!NNSC.NSF.NET!craig
From: craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: re: Brouters
Message-ID: <8811240308.AA01457@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 23 Nov 88 18:40:51 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18


My understanding is that a brouter is a box which:

    (1) acts as a router for those protocol suites it understands

	and

    (2) bridges those protocol suites it doesn't understand

It figures out which protocol suites it understands by looking at the
link level protocol identifier.

The idea is to get around the problem of choosing between routers (which
are relatively good firewalls but only handle the protocol suites they
understand) and bridges (which are lousy firewalls but handle all protocol
suites).

Craig