Wireless Internet Gateway Problems
Posted August 6, 2008 
Comments(0) If you’re like me and use a notebook frequently at home, you probably have it set up with wireless networking. Or, you might have run an Ethernet cable from a cable/dsl router.
Security Tip
If you’re using cable or DSL, or even connected via Ethernet at a university, you can use a router to protect your computer from access by others. The router gets the IP address from your Internet service provider. Then, it creates a local area network to which your computer belongs. The result: you can get to the Internet, responses can get back to you (because the router keeps track of your requests and responses to it, but computers on the “other side of the router” can not initiate connections to your computer — the IP address they see is the router’s!
My notebook is normally wired to my home network. If I want to take it to another room or outside, I’ll turn on the radio in it. Then, I’ll unplug the Ethernet cable and carry the notebook wherever I wanted to go.
Unfortunately, although we can actually make multiple connections to the network from one computer (usually one for the wired connection and one for the wireless), the computer still remembers which should be its “gateway” for talking to the network and the Internet.
When I do the sequence of steps I mentioned, my computer remembers that the local network and the Internet are accessed via my wired connection — even though I just unhooked the cable.
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