摘要 |
A bridging apparatus provides the capability of transparently and unambiguously communicating LAN packets between two separate LAN segments (30a, 30b) which have nodes (34) with duplicate IDs. A communicator (60a, 60b) connected to each LAN segment includes a controller which aliases the source identification (SID) of the remotely originated or sourced LAN packets with an unused ID which is an alias (AID) before sending the LAN packet with the AID as its SID on the local LAN segment. The reverse occurs in response to locally sourced LAN packets containing the AID as the SID. The ID of the remote node which correlates to the AID is substituted as the SID before the LAN packet is transmitted to the remote LAN segment. By aliasing in this manner LAN packets are communicated by use of the AID between the nodes (34) having the duplicated IDs on the two LAN segments without changing the LAN protocol.
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