Routing- a beginners guide
When we are talking about routing , we are discussing only about the TCP/IP internetwork routing. Routing is the process by which we are interconnecting two dissimilar TCP/IP networks.
There can be different types of routing like LAN to LAN routing , LAN to WAN routing or WAN to WAN routing. In a typical company that involves tcp/ip networks there is be so many reasons for us to implement a network that spans multiple tcp/ip network addresses. According to the fundamental concepts of a tcp/ip network the hosts in a single network can ping each other and hosts in different network can not communicate with each other. there comes the need for a facility that interconnect these networks together so that the users in different network can communicate together. As you read through this document the computer that runs this website is on a different network than the one you are presently in . So that make the routing a normal requirement for a network like internet.
There are two methods by which you can establish a routing environment in your company . first one is to configure a network operating system to act as the router. it is called software routing. another method is to buy a dedicated router equipment from a router company like Cisco so that it will serve you. It is called hardware routing. whether you implement the software routing or hardware routing the basic concepts remains the same. But hardware based routing equipments are more efficient than software based routing .
There comes the significance of the company called Cisco who is the major manufacture of the hardware based routing equipments. The Cisco dominate the routing industry with more than 80 % of routers used in the internet and other corporate networks. So it is safer to move with Cisco when you decided to train your brain cells on the vast field of internetwork routing. The operating system embedded in the Cisco routing products is IOS or Cisco internetwoking Operating System. When considering the popularity of Cisco implementations around the world the IOS is the second most important operating system next to Microsoft windows and more implementations than Linux.
