Another Example

For the remainder of this book, let me introduce a new example that is less complex than Groucho Marx University, and may be closer to the tasks you will actually encounter. Consider the Virtual Brewery, a small company that brews, as the name indicates, virtual beer. To manage their business more efficiently, the virtual brewers want to network their computers, which all happen to be PCs running a bright and shiny 1.0.

On the same floor, just across the hall, there's the Virtual Winery, who work closely with the brewery. They run an Ethernet of their own. Quite naturally, the two companies want to link their networks once they are operational. As a first step, they want to set up a gateway host that forwards datagrams between the two subnets. Later, they also want to have a UUCP link to the outside world, through which they exchange mail and news. In the long run, the also want to set up a SLIP connection to connect to the Internet occasionally.