OK, so in my apartment, you websurf to 10.10.10.1, that's the router, and you see this page at first. This is how you control the router, you websurf to it. It's got its own web server inside.
Even though it said that I didn't have to change the settings, I did.
LAN: this refers to the local mini-internet you are creating in your home
or office. In this case, your router, on the inside, appears to be IP 10.10.10.1.
Your LAN contains all the IP addresses from 10.10.10.0 through 10.10.10.255, that's
what the Subnet Mask tells you.
255 = This Exact Same Number
0 = this number can vary.
other numbers = look at it in binary. It's easiest to leave this at 255.255.255.0.
WAN: this refers to the internet at large. It's a very crowded space. Most of the 4 billion possible IP addresses are used. I get address 64.249.203.40 all to myself, that's my apartment, and all of the machines inside it. To the outside world, we all appear to be one machine, at 64.249.203.40.
I'm renting this tiny piece of cyberspace from a company who has set up a subnet
with 64 IP addresses in it, all the way from
64.249.203.0 through
64.249.203.63, and I'm number 40 in that stretch of land.
Out in that subnet, IP address number 1 (really 64.249.203.1) is the "gateway", the machine that redirects all outside traffic to the rest of the internet. It has to be on my subnet otherwise I can't talk to it.
DNS: Website names like sun.com and apple.com and whitehouse.gov all really point to IP addresses. When you type in a domain name like that into your web browser, it has to use the Domain Name System (DNS) to translate "apple.com" into "17.254.3.183" so it can find the data. Your computer has to contact a DNS server to figure this out. These are two DNS servers, in case the first is not working, so you won't be left hanging. Note that the third slot isn't used. Note that these are NOT on your subnet; that's OK. You can pretty much scam anybody's DNS server.
MAC Address: Every piece of circuitry that is manufactured that connects to an Ethernet or TCP/IP wire, comes with its own unique "Mac Address". There are 256 million million different MAC addresses, so many that no two connectors will ever have the same MAC Address. This router has two such connections, one that connects to the internet at large and one that's used for the internal internet.
PPPoE: Yuck! This is more complexity. Gladly, my DSL provider doesn't do things this way, they gave me a Static IP address. I shopped specifically for this.
PPPoE means that I don't get a fixed IP address, even to the outside internet. I can still websurf and do email, though.
The best way to understand this is, read all of these pages. Then, imagine that I wanted to set up my own ISP, with other people dialing in. They would end up getting one of my in-house IP addresses, not a real IP address on the real internet. That's what you're getting with PPPoE, someone else's sub-phony IP address. You can't make your own web server with this this way.
Go back to Allan's Help Desk.