Understanding IP Addressing B-9must use the mask issued by the ISP). This, however, is not aproblematic limitation for your small network.The advantages to this situation is the greater ease and lower costof obtaining a subnet from an ISP rather than a full Class C address.Distributing IP addressesTo set up a connection to the Internet, you may have obtained ablock of IP host addresses from an Internet service provider. Whenconfiguring the Netopia Router, you gave one of those addresses toits Ethernet port, leaving a number of addresses to distribute tocomputers on your network.There are two schemes for distributing the remaining IP addresses:n Manually give each computer an addressn Let the Netopia Router automatically distribute the addressesThese two methods are not mutually exclusive; you can manuallyissue some of the addresses while the rest are distributed by theNetopia Router. Using the Router in this way allows it to function asan address server.One reason to use the Netopia Router as an address server is thatit takes less time than manually distributing the addresses. This isparticularly true if you have many addresses to distribute. You onlyneed to enter information once, rather than having to repeatedlyenter it on each host separately. This also reduces the potential formisconfiguring hosts.Another reason to use the Netopia Router as an address server isthat it will only distribute addresses to hosts that need to use them.If there is a shortage of addresses, the address server willautomatically take an address away from a host that has stoppedusing it and give it to a host that is requesting one. If you do notpossess enough addresses for every host on your network to haveone at all times, using address serving to distribute them is onesolution. However, this is not an efficient solution because a hostwithout an IP address will be forced to wait until a host with one isturned off or gives up its IP address for some other reason.
