Author:
Lon W. McDaniel
Internet 4 U

TCP/IP


Contents

TCP/IP


The Router actually knows which road is open, and which road is the shortest one to use!

We live in a changing world, and the shortest road may not be the shortest in a little while, especially if Dallas turns into a pile a ashes. (I do not have anything against Dallas, some of my cousins live in Texas)

In order to make sure that all those packages really get to their final destination there are lots of routers all over the place. A package can pass through many routers on its way to its destination. It may change direction several times. The odds are fairly good that a message sent (the packages) will take many different routes before it is reassembled again at its destination.

If you are hooked up to the Internet with a permanent connection (i.e. 24 hours a day), then you must have heard somebody mention the word Router at some time. If you are connected at work the router is most likely locked away in some computer room where only techies get to look at it. If you have a permanent connection at home you might stick your router inside the cleaning closet.

A friend of mine here in Sweden has one at home, it looks like this:

Thanks to routers like this one the American Military can rest assured that their messages will get to California even if Dallas is a pile of ashes. When a router re-directs a package to get it onto a new road it does something techies call dynamic routing. We can say that it re-directs the packages if we want to.

Wait a minute! How the heck does a router know where to find the destination computer? Easy, almost. Each computer on the Internet has an identity number of its own. It has an IP-address. Internet Protocol Address = IP-address.

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Copywrite © Lon W. McDaniel 1996