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From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Message-Id: <199611201618.KAA07394@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Subject: Re: Ipx to ip routing
To: exidor@superior.net (Christopher Masto)
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 10:18:43 -0600 (CST)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199611201450.JAA06770@nimbus.superior.net> from "Christopher Masto" at Nov 20, 96 09:50:47 am
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> Joe Greco writes:
> > Ideally, in a school environment, each networked classroom or lab should
> > be on its own subnet, or perhaps several subnets.  When the machines are
> [...]
> 
> This falls apart when you have to deal with roaming.  If your "school
> environment" isn't dealing with student laptops now, it will be within
> the next few years.
> 
> The nicest solution I've seen is a large subnet (~13 bits) with smart
> IP switches.

What do you do about IP address collisions, then???????  Good lord.  Hope
you are great with an Ethernet sniffer, and your switches can trace on
your behalf.  We had this problem at MEI, trust me, it is virtually
impossible to track down transient collisions on such a large network.

I can just see the fireworks when Suzi Smith, the first year arts major,
plugs in her workstation and mistakenly nails your gateway IP address 
in as her PC's IP address.  Woo woo!  There goes your Internet
connectivity.

I would think that in the sort of environment you are suggesting, one
would think that DHCP is the ideal solution, and would allow for properly
subnetted networks that do not suffer from the general problems of a
network with 13 bits of space.

That way you could even "roam" yourself to your home network, or your
local ISP, or the other school across town where you decided to take one
course for the hell of it.

Incidentally: I am no big supporter of DHCP, I do not even like the
concept, but for this kind of thing, it's really the right tool.

... JG