Router Overview
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There are other important types of network devices besides the router, but understanding how a router works will go a long way toward your understanding the whole of internetworking. Before you can learn how to configure and manage routers, however, you need to know the basics of what makes one up. This chapter gives a general review of Cisco router hardware and software. (From the book,
Cisco: A Beginner's Guide, third edition, by Anthony Velte and Toby Velte, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072256354.)
A dizzying array of hardware, software, telecommunications media, and technical expertise goes into internetworking. Switches, hubs, firewalls, packets, gateways, ports, access servers, interfaces, layers, protocols, serial lines, ISDN, frames, topologies—the list can seem endless. But there is a way to simplify things. A single, tangible entity makes sense of it all: the router.
In the most basic terms, internetworking is about nothing more than linking machines and people through a maze of intermediary telecommunications lines and computing devices. This takes routing, which in essence involves just two fundamental missions: determine a path along which a link can be made and transmit packets across that path. It is within these two functions—which take place inside the router—that internetworking becomes easier to understand. This is because the router itself must cut all the complexity down to a level it can deal with. The router does this by working with everything, one IP packet at a time.
Looked at in this way, the router is the basic fabric of internetworks. Indeed, without the router, the Internet as we know it couldn’t even exist. This is because of the router’s unique and powerful capabilities:
- Routers can simultaneously support different protocols (such as Ethernet, Token Ring, ISDN, and others), effectively making virtually all computers compatible at the internetwork level.
- They seamlessly connect local area networks (LANs) to wide area networks (WANs), which makes it feasible to build large-scale internetworks with minimum centralized planning—sort of like Lego™ sets.
- Routers filter out unwanted traffic by isolating areas in which messages can be “broadcast” to all users in a network.
- They act as security gates by checking traffic against access permission lists.
- Routers assure reliability by providing multiple paths through internetworks.
- They automatically learn about new paths and select the best ones, eliminating artificial constraints on expanding and improving internetworks.
In other words, routers make internetworks possible. They do so by providing a unified and secure environment in which large groups of people can connect. However, there are obstacles to bringing users together on internetworks, whether on a corporate intranet, a virtual private network, or the Internet itself. Figure 4-1 depicts how routing technology is the key to overcoming these obstacles.
Routers are like mini Towers of Babel. The router’s ability to support different protocols simultaneously is probably its most important feature because this capability lets otherwise incompatible computers talk with one another regardless of operating system, data format, or communications medium. The computer industry spent decades and billions of dollars struggling to attain compatibility between proprietary systems and met with limited success. Yet, in less than a decade, TCP/IP internetworking has built a common platform across which virtually all computer and network architectures can freely exchange information.
The router’s ability to filter out unwanted traffic is also important to internetworking. If users are bombarded with volumes of unwanted messages or if they feel their systems can be easily broken into, they will resist linking up to internetworks. Traffic filtering and access control provided by routers give users sufficient privacy and confidence to participate in internetworks.
There are other important types of network devices besides the router, but understanding how a router works will go a long way toward your understanding the whole of internetworking. Before you can learn how to configure and manage routers, however, you need to know the basics of what makes one up. This chapter gives a general review of Cisco router hardware and software.
 This chapter is from Cisco: A Beginner's Guide, by Velte and Velte (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072256354). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
Buy this book now. |
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