Every time you connect a computer or router to the Internet, you will be expected to provide important details describing your immediate pathway out to the rest of the world. Four items of information will almost always be required:
1 of 4: Your IP address
2 of 4: A - "Netmask" - indicating the size of your local IP subnet
3 of 4: IP Address of your subnet's Default Gateway
4 of 4: IP Address of an available Domain Name Server
In this movie we will examine these four items in sufficient detail to allow you to understand and use popular, - automated - configuration services for a typical personal computer or a router. We'll also help you to visualize the components that are being configured.
We will use Microsoft's popular - "Windows XP" operating system as the basis for most of the illustrated dialogs and menus. Although routers or computers using other operating systems will not look exactly like Windows XP, most of them use the same vocabulary and request this same information in substantially the same way.
