Two things to understanding your wireless router is: secure your router and figure out what you router IP is. This can be difficult because a variety of routers use what they called the internal house IP’s. Check this site out for several brands of Routers, to figure out your router IP:
BTW you can see the default user and password for most of them, so that tells you how important it is to change those ASAP. <VERY IMPORTANT>
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Now what are these used for? I’ll break it down for the novice users, these are used for your location router. A router monitors the network and directs traffic from the Internet to the computer needing that information. It then has to figure out which computer is asking or sending out packets. How does it know each computer, the router uses its’ own internal ip. It gives each computer a number, usually like something like this:
For Example, A Belkin Router:
- 192.168.1.2
- 192.168.1.3
- 192.168.1.4
- so on until 192.168.1.255
Although you will probably not get to the last one if you did, the router would then use 192.168.2.2, 192.168.2.3, 192.168.2.4, and so on same as the ones up there but it would add a 1 to the 2nd ip number. So what does this tell you. Each computer has it’s own internal IP for the router. Onces the router sends out the information on the net, it strips the internal ip and puts your private ip instead, this way the Internet knows where to send the requested packets or information too. Then like I said the router does what it needs to do to get your information to the right computer.
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Now why tell us about internal IP’s? It is to better understand how your router works for you to get what you need to do out of it. Now you might be asking how do I access the router directly from a browser, that’s simple. You would just put in your internal IP, use the list that I provide you to find out your internal ip and direct your browser there. Some routers have what I call a self DNS, that is if you put in the address bar “http://dslrouter” or “http://cablerouter” you would be taken to your routers setup page. Althought this isn’t on all routers it however is on some of them to better make it easier for you to get to it.
Refer back to my previous post on 10 ways to keep your wireless router secure!
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