On Wednesday 12 January 2005 12:52 pm, Ken Elliott wrote:
> Hi Frank.
>
> I'm a bit rusty on this, but perhaps this example will clear it up.
>
> So where does a bridge fit in to all this?
>
> Assume we are using hubs instead of switches for now. Lets add a second
> hub with another four PCs attached, in another building. We can connect
> the two hubs together with a bridge. The bridge know that the "left"
> network has addresses starting with 192.168.0 and the "right" network has
> addresses starting with 192.168.1
Sorry but this is totally incorrect. A bridge reads MAC addresses, and was
designed to split up an ethernet LAN when the packet collision rate got too
high. But with the advent of switches collisions are really a thing of the
past.
It is an invisible split as it is only going by MAC address. It has absolutely
no idea what IP's are travelling across it.
It also can be used to join two different types of wiring, like coax and
twisted pair.
Routers has for many years also included simple packet filtering capabilities,
thus being thought of as a firewall. In the past these firewalls were seldom
very good when it came to stop hack attacks on it.
A switch knows which port to send packets and does not broadcast all packets
to every port like a hub does. You can say it is much more efficient than a
hub.
--Steve Szmidt
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