Lesson 8 of 81996–today6 min

Your home network

Open your laptop at home and within a couple of seconds it has an IP address, a subnet mask, a default gateway and DNS servers. You typed none of them.

Behind that is a four-message exchange defined in RFC 2131, published in March 1997, and a trick that lets every device in your house hide behind a single public address. Together they are the reason home internet needs no network engineer.

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Sources

RFC 2131: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (March 1997) — RFC Editor
RFC 3022: Traditional IP Network Address Translator (Traditional NAT) — RFC Editor
RFC 1918: Address Allocation for Private Internets — RFC Editor