In the previous lectures, we saw the definition of computer networks, and in this lecture we will
learn about local area network.
As the name suggests, a local area network is usually restricted to spanning a particular geographical
location, such as office building, a single department within a corporate office or even a home office.
Back in the day, we couldn't put more than 30 workstations on the land and we had to keep up with strict
limitations on how far those machines could actually be from each other because of technological advances,
all that's changed now, and we are not nearly as restricted in regard to both land size and a distance
land can span.
Now, the meaning of the term workgroup in this context is slightly different than when the term is
used in the DOE means.
In this context, a work group is a set of devices with no security, association with one another.
But for discourse we simply mean they are physically in the same network segment in a typical business
environment.
It is a good idea to arrange your land work groups along department divisions.
For instance, you could create a work group for accounting, marketing, sales, and you can see on
the screen that they have a different work groups.
That is, they have under the same network segment physically.
First, you don't need to know about the devices that are label, that is switch and hub and servers.
We all are going to see this in that section of networking devices.
Anyway, let us get back to the figure.
Notice that there is a marketing work group and a sales work group.
Now these are local area networks in their most basic form.
Any device that connects to the marketing plan can access the resources of the marketing plan.
In this case, the servers and the printer.
But there are two problems with this.
You must be physically connected to work.
Groups plan to get the resources from it.
And secondly, you cannot get resources from one line to another.
For example, the pieces from marketing cannot access the servers which are connected to the sales.
And now this becomes a problem if the sales PC wants to connect or have access to the printer.
But in our case, in our figure, the printer is connected on this side of the network segment.
So what to do?
Well, in the next lecture we will see what is the solution to this problem.