Subject: Having trouble understanding how routing works with Linksys router

From: "Chris Chapin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 19:50:30 -0300

Hey,

I'm new to the list - hello everyone.

Ok here's the scenario.

I subscribe to broadband through a cable modem.  I have purchased only 1 IP
address from the cable company.  But of course I have more than 1 computer
at my home that I want to connect to the internet simultaneously, so
naturally I need more than 1 IP address.
So I bought a Linksys router, enabled DHCP and boom everyone on my LAN has
an unique IP address.
But no one on the WAN could ever send a packet to the Linksys assigned IP
addresses on my LAN.  WAN people can only send packets to IP address given
to me by my cable company.

So my question is - how do packets get delivered to the correct computer on
my LAN when they come in from the WAN?

At first I thought that maybe the router would just broadcast the data to
all the attached interfaces, but that wouldn't work for people playing the
same game online but in different servers.

I have been unable to discover or figure this out on my home.

Could someone please point me in the right direction?

Thank you,
Chris