TCP/IP and Medley

This document provides a short refresher on configuring TCP/IP that Medley Resellers may find useful to print and bring to a site when configuring it to run Medley.  It is not intended to provide thorough or exact coverage of TCP/IP, but rather to be sufficient to configure TCP/IP for Medley.

TCP/IP Basics
Computers communicate on a TCP/IP network by sending IP messages to each other's IP addresses.  Each computer on a TCP/IP network must have a unique IP address or it will be unable to transfer messages to the correct recipient.

In addition, each computer on a TCP/IP network must have a subnet mask.   A subnet mask indicates which IP addresses the computer can send IP messages to directly and which IP addresses must be reached through a gateway.   When computers can send IP messages to one another directly, they are said to be on the same subnet.

IP addresses and subnet masks are of the form a.b.c.d where a, b, c, and d are each numbers from 0 to 255.

If two computers are on the same LAN and their IP addresses match where their subnet masks' bits are 1, they can send IP messages directly to one another (i.e. they are on the same subnet).   For example, if computer A has an IP address 192.168.1.1 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0, it can send IP messages directly to all computers whose IP addresses start with 192.168.1 (those are the parts of computer A's IP address where its subnet mask's bits are 1).  As a second example, if computer B has an IP address 69.11.3.12 and subnet mask 255.255.0.0, it can send IP messages directly to all computers whose IP addresses start with 69.11.

If you are configuring a LAN that connects to the Internet through a router, your ISP will provide you with a range of IP addresses to assign to your computers.  This is necessary because the Internet is a large TCP/IP network and (remember from above) each computer on a TCP/IP network must have a unique IP address.

If you are configuring a LAN that connects to the Internet through a dial-up mechanism, your ISP will generally NOT provide you with a range of IP addresses to assign to your computers.  In this case, you should use any address beginning with 192.168 combined with any subnet mask beginning with 255.255 - these addresses are reserved by the Internet for so-called "private networks".

Medley requires that every computer in the same pool must be on the same subnet.  Also, Medley allows any number of pools to be on the same subnet.

Note that, while a LAN is defined by electrical signaling (all computers that can directly signal one another are on the same LAN), a subnet is defined as a range of addresses that IP knows are on the same LAN.  IP allows more than one subnet on the same LAN, but IP will require a gateway to send IP messages across these subnets since IP doesn't know they can directly signal one another.

Configuring TCP/IP for Medley on Windows 95

Once the network adapter and TCP/IP are installed, configuring TCP/IP for Medley on Windows 95 is simply the process of assigning an IP address and subnet mask to each computer.  Since all computers that will be in the same pool must be on the same subnet, gateway configuration is irrelevant for Medley.

Assigning IP Addresses and Subnet Masks

Selecting IP Addresses and Subnet Masks

Use the following subnet mask for all computers:  255.255.0.0

Use a unique IP address of the following form for each computer: 169.245.x.y where x is a number from 1 to 254 and y is a number from 2 to 253.  The way you choose which addresses to assign to which computers is entirely up to you, as long as each computer has a unique IP address.