Network Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for network engineers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In NFX I'm trying to create - Devices in a Network with 2 Clients, which can communicate with each other. But it does not work, is it because I have not set a Gateway which can tell the Client, where the other Client are?
Do I need the gateway for Communication in the same network?
Thanks for you help.
You do not need a gateway if both endpoints are in the same network and they have the same network mask. They will send an ARP broadcast to FFFF.FFFF.FFFF and the endpoint with that IP address will reply that ARP with its MAC address, they will fill their ARP tables (associating IP - MAC) and the communication between them will be p2p.
Two clients in the same subnet need to be within the same layer-2 segment or broadcast domain - most often, this is a simple Ethernet switch or a VLAN.
In a MAC-based layer 2 like Ethernet, the source will ARP the destination's IP address to discover its MAC address, encapsulate the ping packet in an L2 frame addressed to the discovered MAC and send it over - no gateway required or used.
If this doesn't work there's no common layer-2 segment between both clients or there's a filter in between, disrupting communication.
