Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp By David Rhodes, Dominic Butler
Table of Contents
Chapter 11. Connecting to the Local Area Network
Many decisions need to be made before we can begin to configure the network interfaces. These can be, and in fact normally are, both complex and highly dependent upon many "local" factors. Some of these are listed below:
Are the systems located in separate buildings or connected to different physical networks, requiring hardware to bridge them?
Will they be connecting to systems running protocols other than TCP/IP?
Will one or more machines be connected to the outside world?
Will there be any gateway systems to other locations (extranets)?
How secure should the network be?
How many systems will be connected in total?
How will the network be split into subnetworks?
We have decided to implement our network in a number of stages. The first stage, covered by this chapter, is to connect all the systems to a private network, or LAN. We will split this into a number of subnetworks based on the tasks that each system carries out. For example, the main servers and the general clients will be known as the "internal" systems and will be in one subnet, while the systems that will later allow us to connect to the outside world will be known as the "external" facing systems and will be located in a second subnet.
This allows us to isolate the tasks that are described here to those that deal with local connections only, and will hopefully provide a better understanding of the processes involved. The downside of this is that we may be doing some portions of the work a number of times, as we rework some of these settings in later chapters. This isn't a problem for our network as we can simply alter the files as we wish, but it will probably be more difficult in a production environment. So please be aware of this if you decide to use some of our values!
