Routers: The Silent Killer

Ok, so last time we talked, I was explaining that the Internet is not controlled by gremlins or dark magics or anything of that sort. I did mention routers, and that they're very important. Well, they still are, nothing's changed since Saturday. Routers, by definition, route traffic.


You're probably going, "Well, dur" right now and hitting the back button on your browser. Well, hang on a second. There's more to it than that. For an example, we have a router here. This is Router 66. For the moment, let's pretend that there is only one router in the entire internet, and this is the one. Now, the real Route 66 connects Chicago and Los Angeles, so I need to find a way to represent both cities. Well, Chicago is known for the Cubs and deep dish pizza. I don't like the Cubs, so we'll represent Chicago with a pizza, like so:

Mm, that looks good. Ok, now we have to represent California. That's easy. California is known for its governor and, well, boobs. So I've tastefully made this image to represent the great state of California:

Wow, that's disturbing. I may have nightmares for a while based on that one. Ok, now that we've got the preliminaries done, Router 66 connects Chicago and LA together. However, these aren't the only two places in the network. It doesn't matter what these other networks are, so we're going to represent them as a small duck and a piece of aged cheddar cheese. Why did I do that? Well, why not? In any case, now we have a basis for our network. The following image is a picture of what our network looks like:



Ok! Now, let's say that Chicago is sending a message to LA. With all these networks, the job of the router is to send the packet (the data, the message, whatever) to the correct place. If the router sent the message from Chicago to the duck, that wouldn't be very helpful, would it?

Thus, the router determines the correct place to send that message, and thus LA gets the message and can send back replies. This is just a very basic network, though. There can be multiple routers, some connected in loops. In a situation like this, there needs to be a way to determine the best path to get to somewhere. That, however, is for next time, when I'm going to talk about routing protocols.

Until next time, I'll be here, trying to get the image of Arnold with boobs out of my head.