[ale] hey router gurus :)

Joseph A Knapka jknapka at earthlink.net
Sun Aug 4 18:33:09 EDT 2002


Stephen Turner wrote:
> 
> got a rather wierd question, know where i can find like, the physical
> specs of a router? like how it works sorta thing? like how they are able
> to take soo many ports and run them through the cpu er what have you and
> do the processing and how it generally works? im really interested to
> learn more about routers other than what cisco is telling me. thanks in advance!

Well, IANARG, but I think you could get the general idea by
reading the Linux networking code. All routers, be they
dedicated hardware boxes or PCs running Linux or Windows
(retch) boxen with IP forwarding enabled, basically do
the same thing: receive a packet, look at its destination
address, consult the route table to find out the
correct interface to send it on, and send it. That
process could be decorated with all sorts of packet
filtering or whatever, but the basic process of routing
is pretty simple. You'd probably also want to read the
relevant RFCs (IP, TCP, IP-over-Ethernet); I don't
know the RFC numbers offhand, but you should be able
to find them at <URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html> .

Cheers,

-- Joe

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