"Brandishing Your Buttocks At Me Is Only Making Me Angrier!"

This time I am going to follow-up on the last entry with a little more detail of what's going on but still not really get technical. Then I will go into some detail on the experiences I have had in various online-only computer games I have played/am playing/will play.

I'm trying to figure out how much detail I should be giving. I'm pretending anyone is reading this for some reason. Well first off there's the Internet. The Internet is just a gian mesh/spider web of computers connected to each other. And these computers are not necessarily personal type computers with a keyboard and mouse running Windows or whatever. So more accurately there's millions of simply "devices" on the Internet. And each device must have a unique identifying number that only it has. If you end up with the same number as another device on the Internet, well that's not supposed to be possible actually. For the record this unique identifying number is called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. So every computing device has at least one IP address. In fact the device you're reading this on right now has at least two. Besides the one everyone else on the Internet can see you as you also have one called the "localhost" address, which is 127.0.0.1.

I hope that wasn't too technical. This brings me to the concepts introduced last time. Usually when you sign up for the Internet with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you only get one address. Usually you get a new IP address every time you connect to your ISP or your ISP swaps your address with another one every fixed period of time at their own discretion. This leads to a problem if you have more than one computer you would like to have on the Internet at one time. So without paying the ISP even more money how exactly do you do this?

First of all there's usually two networks involved in my scenario: the "internal" network and the "external network". The external of course being the Internet or everyone outside of what you would consider "your" one or more computers. The internal network is what is your network of one or more computers, the ones you are trying to connect to the Internet.

Well besides the "lovely" connection sharing feature in some versions of MS Windows you can buy a device that features DHCP (Dynamic Host Protocol) and NAT (Network Address Translation).

DHCP, or rather the server part anyway, is simply a program that sits and runs on a computer or computing device and says (as it would seem to us humans) "here have an IP address...here have an IP address...here have an IP address..." over and over. On the other end are the DHCP clients conversely saying "gimme an IP address...gimme an IP address...gimme an IP address...". This makes setting up a network very, very easy.

NAT works along side DHCP in this case. DHCP give everybody looking for one an IP address, NAT keeps track of this and re-routes as necessary.

So your DHCP/NAT device contains your one valid IP address from your ISP and hands out local-only addresses to the devices on your local network. This way your local network is divided off from the Internet. So when you connect to a website you send a signal to your NAT device which then re-writes the signal and re-sends to the website of your choice. When the website comes back in the form of a web page or whatever the NAT device remembers what your local address was when you originally requested it and forwards the information to your computer. This is all transparent and happens in fractions of a second of course.

All this is also supposed to help protect you from the outside world. After all if you're on the outside and don't know where you going on the inside it will be that much more difficult. Unfortunately if you want to do some fun things like set up a server for a computer game or a web server (for some strange reason) it may take a while. Or at least it did with me any way. You must set up something referred to only as "port forwarding". Basically all this means is "open a hole to the outside network assigned a number. When a signal from the outside comes in referring to that number send it to this specific computer on the internal network".

I hope this somewhat easy to understand. I did the best I possibly could to make it sound simple. Actually this is difficult because the concepts are not simple, they're quite complex.

¶ 2:07 PM