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Originally posted by Evangellydonut: [snip] Router: Take the single "real" IP your ISP assigns, create a bunch of "fake" IPs, and put all the computers behind the router on those "fake" IPs. 192.168.x.x and 10.0.x.x are dedicated "fake" IPs for routers. Why use routers? as mentioned above, ISPs will charge extra per IP, and unless you want to pay for multiple modems, you need to get a hub/switch anyway. Since routers are MUCH cheaper now, around the $100 mark, it's probably the best way to go in a SOHO setting. |
Not quite true, Gelly...
What you're describing is a NAT device. Admittedly, many 'home' routers (i.e. DSL, Cable, etc.) will also perform NAT to allow connection sharing, but NAT is *not* a router function.
The definition of a router is a device that accepts incoming traffic and decides the best path to route that connection to get to its destination.
In a home environment, this almost exclusively means taking traffic from an internal host and routing it to your ISP (maybe also performing NAT at the same time), but that's a small part of routing in general, simply because you only have one way out of your network.
On the other hand, ISPs (especially large ISPs) may have multiple connections to multiple points/upstream providers. Your ISPs routers have to decide whether each packet you send to them is best routed out through, say, this T3 circuit to UUNet, this OC-3 circuit to Sprint, or some other circuit through another provider.
In other words, routers have intelligence designed to optimize traffic flows over a wide area network. Switches, on the other hand, can only handle local area traffic (even though 'local' could mean several thousand hosts in a large corporate environment).
For a home network, the only router that matters is the one that links you to your ISP. If you don't have a router somewhere on your network, you can't talk to the outside world at all.