On Sat, 28 Feb 2015, Johnny Billquist wrote: How are you doing more than one line without bridges or repeaters? Have I misread? (Not counting routing) I was referring to repeaters. They are totally invisible to the ethernet, so I do not consider to cables connected by a repeater to be two different ethernet segments. Ahhhh. But if others do consider that separate segments, then we atleast understand each other. :-) Yeah. I understand you now. But the reality of it is that on your ethernet connection, you can see more than 199 other machines, even without switches or bridges. The 500m limit of the ethernet cable is just because of signal quality. The design as such put an upper limit on how far apart two hosts can be, in time, for the collision detection to work properly. The is a hard limit. The 2.5 meter between transcievers is also more of an effect of physics. :-) Physics always get in the way! Hmmmm, when did VMS/BSD get software bridging capabilities? No idea. Can VMS do bridging now? Not sure, that's why I was asking. ;) Johnny -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects