Hello, I have a interesting question on network design as follows : We have 6 departments : MIS - 192.168.1.0 Customer Support - 192.168.2.0 HRD - 192.168.3.0 Sales - 192.168.4.0 Engineering - 192.168.5.0 Finance - 192.168.6.0 8 Servers - on 192.168.7.0 These departments are scattered in 3 buildings. Using fibre backbone and 10/100 switches the network is connected physically. I want to know since all the subnets are different how can they talk to each other if required ? Finance group(192.168.6.0) will normally work on finance Server(192.168.7.3). How this can be acheived ? All are using Subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 How can a user in sales (192.168.4.6) access the user in HRD (192.168.3.9) ? Do I need a router in between ? If not, how this can be acheived without a router ? Any cheaper solutions available ? Are there any good web sites on network design with examples for a network of say 50 PC's , 200 PCs, more than 500 PC's etc ? Please guide me. Thanks in advance skamat

Yes, you need routers for each subnet. Theoretically, you could move to class B networks and have more PC's per network with less routers. However, that could hurt bandwidth and performance of the network. MCSE, MCSA Messaging, baby!

Or a router with 8 interfaces. Also, some corporate switch such as cisco 5000 has routing module card upgrade. Danny

how it can be acheived using a VLAN Switch ? thanks skamat