India Broadband Forum

sunay_sk

Hi,
I kindly need info about how a switch assigns Ips to its connected ports.....from wht ips it starts n wht ips it ends.......do they hv the specific order or it is done randomly......

just4kix

First you must understand the routers.

Every router has a DHCP service and controls IP addresses. For example, a Class A router on the IP address 192.168.1.1 can assign IP addresses from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.255 under the subnet, i.e., 255 computers can connect to this router. Class A routers have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Class B routers have a larger subnet. The class B router on the same IP address can assign ip addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.255.255, i.e., 255 * 255 computers can connect to the class B router. The subnet mask is 255.255.0.0.

It is physically impossible for a router to have so many physical ports. Well, not impossible but so many ports will make the router very bulky. Here in the switch comes into play.

A switch has fixed number of physical ports. It takes part of the IP range from the router and assigns these to the computers connected to it. Most modern networks use automatic DHCP and hence there is no strict physical (static) IP that is assigned to any computer. Any computer that connects get the first available IP address from the router via the switch. However, it is possible to reserve IP addresses in the router for machines that require a static IP. This is done by the DNS in the network.

We could go on and on, on this topic. So let me know whether you understood so far. Anyway, I am no network expert. Just some general 'gyan' which could be wrong totally.

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