Whats the difference between a public and private IP Adress?
We did this! Okay, in short, your GATEWAY has your Public IP address, and your desktop computer (and any other machines inside your home/organization) have private IP Addresses. Simply put; it’s outside and inside. Anyone “out there” can see your public IP, but only machines inside your own network know each other’s individual private IP addresses. .. So, let’s say a packet of data from “out there”, is trying to reach your machine; it could be a legitimate connexion from a client, maybe an FTP client, or some game player, or script-kiddie, or whatever. It leaves their machine, and starts its journey, hop-to-hop, attempting to get to yours. “Out There”, is the internet. When you first connected to the internet, via your ISP’s backbone, they assigned your connexion an IP address (or more than one, in some cases) from a large pool of IP Addresses they own. Any machine sending you a packet of data can reach you at this IP. Some folk pay for a static IP, most folk get a dynamic IP; that is,
