In order to learn all of the networking details of your wireless network, you need to understand how the network is organized. This usually involves reading the network configuration files, but you also need to understand IP addresses and how they are assigned to the various networks.
Yes, the IP addresses of wireless routers are unique and assigned to your wireless network. But that doesn’t mean there are no other devices that are accessing this network. In fact, some routers use the IP addresses assigned to the wireless network to access other networks. This is called “ARPing” and it’s an important security step that should only be done when you know you need it.
As a general rule, it is not necessary to know about the network-related devices listed in your router configuration files.
So, we were using a laptop in our office, then an iPad in our home, then a tablet in the car, and now we have a tablet in the shower. This means that as soon as we take a shower, the computer in the shower doesn’t know whether or not anything else in the shower is connected to that network.
If you’re in the house, or at least, are in your bedroom, that’s good. But if you’re in the office, or at least your office is in your shower, you don’t need to know what kind of computer you’re in.
The network switches are actually part of a network router, but they do have a number or IP address assigned to them. So if youre in the office and you take a good long shower, you can tell the computer in the shower to send out a request to all other computers in the office to ask for a new set of IP address.
The switch has no idea how to work with computers, as no internet connection is involved. The routers are more like routers with two computers as routers. The computers use the switch to get an IP address. But the switch does not know this.
This sounds silly, but if you have an office with multiple computers and they all have a different set of IP addresses, you’re going to have to make a new IP address on each of those computers. Just like if your office has a different set of IP addresses for each of the computers, you’ll have to make a new IP address on each of the computers. That is what the switch is trying to do.
This is so ridiculously stupid that it’s actually kind of a nice feature. If someone connects to your office using your local network, they may have their own unique IP address. This is so stupid, it turns out, that a switch that doesn’t know about this feature is actually a really nice feature.
