A Brief Introduction to using a Windows NT Server as a Router

The development of network technology is no longer limited to a small LAN. In daily networking, the most common problem is to connect the existing network to achieve maximum resource sharing and information communication. To interconnect different networks, the first problem is what protocol is used. Up to now, TCP/IP has become the most widely used universal network protocol. It is recognized by many computer users. With TCP/IP, you can easily connect networks of different network types and operating systems, and connect them to the Internet.

In TCP/IP network interconnection, different networks often use routers. Traditional hardware-based routers are often expensive and not accepted by General units. In the network connection process, two or two local networks are interconnected, you do not need to use expensive dedicated routers. In fact, there are many network operating systems that provide routing functions, but they are only software-based routing, such as Windows NT Static Routing System, NOVELL multi-protocol routing, and other software-based routing technologies.

Software-based routing is definitely not as functional as a hardware-based dedicated router. But it already has the basic functions of the router. You can implement basic routing functions. Software-based routing is ideal for the interconnection between small networks. The following uses the interconnection between networks as an example to describe the software-based routing technology.

As we all know, in TCP/IP Protocol, IP Protocol provides addressing and routing functions. When data is sent over the network, the data is first packaged into IP data packets. IP allows data packets to be transmitted from one place to another on the network. Data is transmitted over the network in one way. In one Ethernet, it is easy to send packets from one machine to another, because Ethernet is a broadcast-based network, messages sent from any machine will be immediately monitored by all machines on the Internet. Only those machines with the same address in the message will send a response. Other machines will ignore this message. It can be seen that in the same network, no route is required for each message to directly reach its destination. However, when two or more networks are interconnected, the situation is quite different. 1 shows that when a machine in the network Counter sends information to a machine in the network Computer Center, if there is no route from the network Counter to the network Computer Center, the information cannot be sent at all.

From the above analysis, we can know that the information in the same network can be smoothly transmitted, so if there is such a machine: a machine that belongs to both the network Counter and the network Computer Center. Through it, two different networks can transmit information to each other. In fact, in Windows NT, IP routing is a function of IP addresses. This route is a static route. A static router must manually construct and update the route table.

When an NT router is created for each network, the creation process is as follows:

1. install two NICs on the same Windows NT machine. The NIC can use any Nic supported by NT. Windows NT can be either a Windows NT Server or a Windows NT Workstation, preferably version 3.51 or later. This article is based on Win? Chinese version of dowsNTServer4.0.

2. Go to the control panel and install the TCP/IP protocol.

3. Configure the NIC: Configure an IP address for each Nic. The two IP addresses belong to different IP addresses in the network.

4. Set the IP address routing function of Windows NT to Enable.

5. Confirm and restart the computer.

In this way, the NT router can work between the two networks.