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Broadcast Addresses
Most people use the term broadcast as a generic term, and most of the time, we understand what
they mean. But not always. For example, you might say, “The host broadcasted through a router
to a DHCP server,” but, well, it’s pretty unlikely that this would ever really happen. What you
probably mean—using the correct technical jargon—is, “The host broadcasted for an IP address;
a router then forwarded this as a unicast packet to the DHCP server.” Oh, and remember that with
IPv4, broadcasts are pretty important, but with IPv6, there aren’t any broadcasts sent at all.
There are the four different broadcast (generic
term broadcast) types:
- Layer 2 broadcasts These are sent to all nodes on a LAN.
- Broadcasts (layer 3) These are sent to all nodes on the network.
- Unicast These are sent to a single destination host.
- Multicast These are packets sent from a single source and can be transmitted to many devices
on different networks.
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