I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how LAN to WAN and vice versa works. To give an example that might be helpful. On a given network, you use a domain's WAN to remote into their term server from which point you can access the rest of the network devices on that domain. I understand this conceptually to some degree, but I'd appreciate some further insight on this. A visual illustration of how this works, would be helpful. Thanks.
Asked
Active
Viewed 250 times
1 Answers
0
Imagine that you live in your own house in some small remote village. Your front door is a router. Your own rooms are on the inside (the "LAN" side), and the rest of the world is outside (the "WAN" side). Now think about your driveway. You can again go two ways – towards your home ("LAN") or drive out towards the rest of the world ("WAN"). The town itself has one, maybe two roads going "outside". (However, once you get to the larger cities, they're all interconnected somehow, with many routes in various directions, and there is no single "WAN" path anymore.)
It's a poor analogy, but maybe it'll get the point across – the internet actually seems quite similar to me: There isn't necessarily a clear line between "belonging to LAN" and "belonging to WAN". The router merely shuffles packets between arbitrary interfaces.
Instead, in this situation, "LAN" and "WAN" are just names describing the port function. You're at the "end" of a connection, and your routers are configured for the typical asymmetric routing, where one interface receives a connection from the "outside", and that connection is provided to the LAN.
Often the "WAN" interface also runs a DHCP client to obtain its own IP address from the ISP, while the "LAN" interfaces run a DHCP server to provide IP addresses to connected devices.
(In contrast, a core/backbone router would have a more-or-less symmetric configuration, with many routes through all interfaces – not receiving/providing a connection, but joining parts of the internet together.)
grawity
- 501,077