one hop they will have arrived at their destination. Clients can now talk to servers or mainframes
that are one hop away but not to clients on other rings, which would be two hops away. To
curtail the explorer replication even further, it is a good idea to give the Token Rings the same
number because an explorer never visits the same ring twice. However, in this situation, the
bridge numbers would have to be different. Confusion would set in if they were numbered
the same.
routes explorers. The reason behind this is that mainframes are typically arranged in a
hierarchical fashion, and NetBios servers usually are distributed. As a result, there might need
to be more hop-counts for SNA because there might be more hops to the SNA mainframes than
the hop-counts for NetBios servers, which are probably distributed around the rings.