Admintly — Home Network Setup | admintly.net
How a router forwards packets between networks and how DNS resolves names to addresses, in plain terms.
A router forwards data packets between computer networks by reading the network address in each packet header and consulting its routing table. The routing table is the list of known destinations and next hops; the packet header carries the address the router reads before deciding where the packet goes next.
Home and small office routers perform this forwarding between the home computers and the Internet. Every request leaving the home network passes through the router, and every response returning passes back through it, which is why the router's configuration determines who can join the network and how traffic is secured.
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DNS resolves human-readable names into network addresses. When a browser requests a page by name, the name must be translated into an address before any packet can be routed, because the routing table acts on addresses rather than names.
The translation is usually performed on behalf of the home computers by the router itself, which forwards the query to a resolver — typically the one configured by the Internet provider, though the resolver is a router-level setting that can be changed.
Because DNS sits in front of every connection, its settings have an immediate, visible effect on browsing. If pages load when typed as an address but not as a name, the resolver configured on the router is unreachable or is answering with stale data.
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