Thread: Network connection - which way?
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Old 06-03-2008, 18:50   #10
Jon T
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Re: Network connection - which way?
Your switch will contain a table of what MAC addresses can be reached on each of it's ports. When your PC wishes to communicate with your NAS for the first time it must try to find out it's hardware (MAC) address, this is done by transmitting an ARP broadcast that basically says "respond if you are the device with IP address X.X.X.X." The next time the PC wants to talk to the NAS, the mac address it has learnt in the previous step is included in the IP packet. The switch then knows to only send that packet out on a specific port.

Splitting IP ranges and having to manually construct/edit routing tables is not needed in your situation at all. The packets from your PC that are destined for you NAS(and vice versa), won't go anywhere near you router.
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