Whats the advantage of setting up subnets?
Answer Hi Thomas, Let me start with subnets part of your question first. Later on I will also elaborate some other ways in which you can acheive the isolation. Every PC on TCP/IP network has a unique address assigned to it called its IP Address. This IP Address alongwith its Subnet Mask decides the local Subnet of the PC. You can refer to lot of documentation available on Internet for details on IP Addressing. www.3com.com site has some very nice documents for subnetting. If a PC wants to talk to some other PC in its own subnet, then it tries to directly contact the host and establish the session. But if the destination IP Address is not found to be in the local subnet (this can be calculted using local IP Address / Subnet mask and remote IP Address / Subnet mask), then the packet is forwarded to another IP Address called default gateway. This default gateway is assigned to local Router, which knows how to reach the destination subnet. Now suppose you configure two separate IP Subnets
