Network Design

Discontiguous masks are something that is going to be somewhat historic within the network design toolbox. It is basically a methodology of looking at particular bits of a network/host definition. The big thing to recall is that as a packet crosses a network device it does so within a packet. The packet is nothing more than a stream of bits. Within the packet header there are bits that define the source network address and the destination network address. This is where discontiguous masks come into play. With a system that can leverage discontiguous masks, you can access information about any part of the network bits, not just starting reading and then stopping (or vice versa) when you look at a bit boundry masking only.

In a recent podcast there was some discussion that it sounded like the term Micro Segmentation was being used where it was really traditional segmentation. So I thought I would put out a few thoughts on this front.

What is Segmnentation in Networking #

Segmentation is a methodology to create separatet zones of sorts of various traffic types. Various places you may want to do this is within a campus environment to separate students from faculty, or engineering from finance. The list of examples goes on and on. Go to a basic reading of VLANs and you will get the idea of what segmentation is. Once you have VLANs, really segmentation then builds upon this and allows policy to be applied. This policy can be whether or not hosts should be able to talk to each other, or various traffic treatments (QoS). This is something that is well covered already and I do not wish to cover more.