> You know, I really would like to see an answer to this. I wound up arguing
> with an instructor at a Pacific Bell class about bridging, shouting that
> people don't BRIDGE across WANs, they ROUTE. He insisted that lots of
> people do it. Him being the 20-year telco veteran, and me being the
> knucklehead dumb enough to take a frame relay (er, 'FastPacket (TM)')
> marketing class, I sat down and shut up.
Okay im a 20 year knucklehead so Ill try to BRIDGE the gap! heh heh...
> But who does this? And why? I just don't get bridging over ISDN or other
> slower-than-wire speeds. Feedback on this topic would be appreciated.
The world does NOT revolve around IP. There are lots of other network
protocols, ips, netbeui, netbios (upper level protocol), appletalk,
lantastic', datapoint, proprietary hardware protocols, video, etc. To
ROUTE a protocol, it must be understood by the router as to what it is,
etc... you CAN bridge easily, and YES you can bridge netbios whereas you
cannot route it without encapsulation. I do it all the time.
A bridge is kinda DUMB, but not too dumb. It gets a packet in on one side
and sends it out the other side. Smart bridges will begin building a table
of the mac addresses that live on either side of the bridge so that itcan
filter out what it doesnt need to send to the other side. So bridge
LEARNS your networks. Some bridges allow you to input filters so it will
NEVER try to send packets that have a specific header type.
BTW, for those who try to yell at me that netbios cannot be routed...
There is a company in Sweden called April that makes a "netbios" router
software package. It was designed for x25 originally. Its quite slow over
modems, but pretty nice over 128k isdn.
Ive been routing (really just filtered bridging) netbios for about 8 years
now.
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Jake Messinger 713-772-6690 jake@ams.com
Advanced Medical Systems, Inc. jake@uh.edu
9919 S. Gessner #201
Houston, Texas 77071 http://www.ams.com/~jake
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