Agilent Technologies N8201A - Manual (Page 119)

Glossary 7
Agilent N8201A Performance Downconverter Synthetic Instrument Module, 3 Hz to 26.5 GHz 115
Private Network All of the devices on a private network use IP addresses that have been
reserved for private use. The most common private network IP addresses are of the form
192.168.x.x
and 169.254.x.x. Devices which have been assigned a private
network IP address cannot generally communicate with other devices outside of their
private network. Many devices can use the same IP address (for example,
192.168.1.1
) as long as they each belong to different private networks.
Router A router can be used to transfer messages between two (or more) networks.
Routers are often used to connect a private network to a larger network (for example, a
company network, or the Internet). The router can also be used to isolate a local network
from a larger corporate or public network.
Site LAN A site LAN is a local area network in which LAN-enabled instruments and
Windows PCs are connected to a site LAN (workgroup LAN, Intranet, or enterprise LAN)
through (optional) routers, hubs, and/or switches.
Static IP Address A device uses a static IP address when it always attempts to use the
same IP address every time that it is turned on. Using a static IP address can be useful if
you always want to communicate with an instrument using the same address every time it
is turned on. However, using a static IP address can lead to IP address conflicts if two
instruments are given the same static IP address.
Subnet (Subnetwork) A subnet is a group of devices which is a subset of a larger group
of devices. Breaking a large network down into many smaller subnets can make the
network easier to manage, and can decrease the amount of traffic that gets sent between
devices.
One thing a device on a network can do is send a message to all of the other devices on its
subnet. If a network consists of only a single subnet, that message would have to be sent to
every device on the network. However, if the network has been broken down into subnets,
the message would only be sent to other devices on the same subnet as the device sending
the message.
Subnet Mask A subnet mask is used to specify how a network is broken down into
subnets. Subnet masks look like IP addresses; they are of the form x.x.x.x. Common
subnet masks include 255.0.0.0, 255.255.0.0 (use this for private networks), and
255.255.255.0
.
When written in binary, subnet masks usually become several 1s followed by several 0s.
For example:
255.255.0.0
would become
11111111.11111111.00000000.00000000 .