On Monday 12 October 2009, shimi wrote: > On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Aharon Schkolnik <aschkol...@gmail.com>wrote: > > On Thursday 08 October 2009, shimi wrote: > > > The right way to do it is not with an Access Point. Someone needs to > > > "multiplex" your connection to multiple devices. Since you have just > > > one external IP address, someone needs to "share" it between your > > > multiple machines and do "magic" that makes it (multiple unicast > > > machines between one unicast address) work. We call that magic-maker > > > a "NAT router" (which basically every home router does). > > > > Yeah, I realize that I need NAT (or PAT in Cisco terms), but I thought > > (I admit I didn't check) that the AP might do the NAT. > > A pure AP is a "wireless switch" - it talks Layer 2 only.
Yeah, but a lot of consumer oriented products are not pure anything. Guess that's why I thought the manufacturers might have decided to toss NAT in where it really doesn't belong. On the other hand, I didn't give it much thought, and if I had, I would have realized that that was an unlikey scenario given the leap in complexity needed to add NAT to a simple AP. > > > > So what you > > > need is an Ethernet router (with an Ethernet port on his WAN port). > > > > Thing is, I was wondering why I need a router. I don't need it to do > > any routing decisions (unless I want to share files between connected > > PCs, which I don't). I do need NAT, but I kind of thought an AP would > > do that. > > NAT is performed at Layer 3 (some would even say Layer 4?). A layer 2 > device does not understand (nor cares about) these layers at all. It > can just forward frames... I'm pretty sure it's considered a layer three function. Anyway, certainly not layer two. > > -- Shimi > -- The day is short, and the work is great, | Aharon Schkolnik and the laborers are lazy, and the reward | is great, and the Master of the house is | aschkol...@gmail.com impatient. - Ethics Of The Fathers Ch. 2 | 054 3344135 _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
