3/10/10 Network+ Class

Today we talked about routers. A routers purpose is to connect a LAN to a WAN like the Internet which is one really big WAN. A router has 2 ports, a LAN port and a WAN port. In addition a router can have multiple WAN ports but only needs one LAN port. If you have a small organization, most likely you have a router there. Here it is not difficult to choose a routing protocol; the organization could use the static protocol because it doesn’t require much to keep it up. But if an organization is large, then it is highly suggested that the dynamic protocol is used. Here very little work has to be done by the network administrator because the addresses and routes are established dynamically (automatically). All routers have routing tables. A routing table is something like the specifications of the router. A routing table consists of a: Destination LAN IP, Subnet Mask, Gateway, and Interface. Another topic that we discussed was NAT (Network Address Translation). This is what most if not all of the companies use. NAT is a form of security because it takes the actual IP address and changes it to another one. The best way to look at this is to imagine leaving you home and put a mask on and do what you were going to do. Your task still gets done but nobody saw your face and knows where you can from. That is similar to NAT. When you access a website instead of it sending over the actual IP address (where you can actually see their network) NAT gives it a different one to mask it.