Subject: 10. Should I route or bridge IP between two Pipeline 50s?
This is truly situation-dependent; many flamewars have been waged
over the advantages and disadvantages of routing over bridging.
Generally, routing IP has these advantages:
- easier to prevent unneeded traffic (of unused protocols, or of
other stations);
- easier-to-manage security;
- more flexible: with dynamic routing, your unit could call into
different locations with the same source address, allowing the
answering unit(s) to propagate your route; this has the effect
of providing some dynamic failover capability (when bridging IP,
you must be numerically part of the remote subnet you call).
Bridging has the advantage of conserving address space: you can bridge
many more stations into one IP class C-size subnet than you could route,
(even with the tightest 30-bit subnet mask, you could only get 62
remote stations into a class C network). So if you have many stations
but limited address space (not unusual these days), it may be necessary
to bridge.
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