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<blockquote data-quote="Amen-Moses" data-source="post: 7062" data-attributes="member: 114"><p>A router sits between all your machines and the internet and .. well .. routes network traffic basically. i.e when one of your machines requests something from a web server the router "routes" the request to the internet and then "routes" the reply back to the appropriate machine. Typically a router cares not one wit what the OS of the machine is nor how many machines are on the network (of course they are limited by how many ports they have if it is a wired network but theoretically a router can handle 254 machines on wireless although practically they are probably limited for cost reasons).</p><p></p><p>The router presents a single IP address to the ISP and supplies IP addresses to the client machines on the network using DHCP protocol. Many routers also provide much higher security than software firewalls, mine is configured to use encoding of network traffic, firewall functionality and I've programmed in my MAC addresses (the actual hardware address of all the network cards) so others can't hook into it. They also can stop port access (i.e it stopped the latest worm attack) and even disallow ping requests so you are completely hidden from the outside world (obviously not a good thing if you want to host web pages from home but that is configurable so all machines bar your web server are hidden). </p><p></p><p>For less than $200 it is well worth it imo.</p><p></p><p>Of course your problem is that you use an ADSL modem, if it doesn't have an R45 ethernet port (i.e if it is only USB) then you are probably screwed because most routers only provide R45 connectivity. If you could get an ADSL modem with wireless router built in that would probably be the perfect answer.</p><p></p><p>Amen-Moses</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Amen-Moses, post: 7062, member: 114"] A router sits between all your machines and the internet and .. well .. routes network traffic basically. i.e when one of your machines requests something from a web server the router "routes" the request to the internet and then "routes" the reply back to the appropriate machine. Typically a router cares not one wit what the OS of the machine is nor how many machines are on the network (of course they are limited by how many ports they have if it is a wired network but theoretically a router can handle 254 machines on wireless although practically they are probably limited for cost reasons). The router presents a single IP address to the ISP and supplies IP addresses to the client machines on the network using DHCP protocol. Many routers also provide much higher security than software firewalls, mine is configured to use encoding of network traffic, firewall functionality and I've programmed in my MAC addresses (the actual hardware address of all the network cards) so others can't hook into it. They also can stop port access (i.e it stopped the latest worm attack) and even disallow ping requests so you are completely hidden from the outside world (obviously not a good thing if you want to host web pages from home but that is configurable so all machines bar your web server are hidden). For less than $200 it is well worth it imo. Of course your problem is that you use an ADSL modem, if it doesn't have an R45 ethernet port (i.e if it is only USB) then you are probably screwed because most routers only provide R45 connectivity. If you could get an ADSL modem with wireless router built in that would probably be the perfect answer. Amen-Moses [/QUOTE]
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