This is part 6 and final of our series on Internet connection problem; if you landed to this page I recommend reading this series from part 1 to get an idea of what we been up to.
Today we will discuss how a default gateway works wrapping up with a 13 minutes video on how the Internet works to empower what we have learned so far about the Internet, so what’s a default gateway? A default gateway is a middle man for your network; it routes and translates packets from your network going to the Internet. Your devices on your local area network use private IP addresses and as you might already know private IP addresses cannot be use on the Internet so is the job of your router default gateway to strip off those private addresses and replace them with a valid public IP address.
A private IP address usually looks like 192.168.10.29 and public IP addresses look like 24.243.10.44, your router has 2 interfaces one that has a private IP and the other with the public IP, your computers on your local network connect to the interface with the private IP, when the router receives the packets from your computer it strip off that private IP and replace it with the public IP, the router keeps a dynamic table to record from where those packets are coming from, and where they’re going to, when the request is returned the router puts back the private IP address and send it to your computer.
Why we use default gateways? Default gateways are crucial for several reasons, one of them is that allow to have multiple computers using the Internet on a network only using one public IP address, they also enhance security on networks, just imagine all computers with public IP addresses, it would be hard to keep the bad guys out of your private networks. Routers also are the reason why the internet is growing so fast, if all computers used public IP addresses probably we would have ran out of them already.
This video was made long ago but the concepts are still fresh, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. hopefully tomorrow I will be starting a new series on how to keep your computer at optimum performance, from cleaning out spy-ware to tips and tricks on how to tweak some windows settings to get most of your windows juice. “˜till then.
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