IP Distribution Question

thewhitehart said:

Under the Network tab for my express in the Airport Admin Utility, I have it checked off to distribute IP addresses to airport client computers by "Sharing a single IP address (using DHCP and NAT)."

How does this differ from distributing a range of IP addresses? I thought each computer had to have its own IP address, how can it share the same one? When both the imac and ibook are connected, they show unique IP addresses in the Network Preferences pane. How is it sharing a single IP address?

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Not sure really but it may explain why i cant download on both my Macs when it is set to 1 download per IP address.

thewhitehart said:

Under the Network tab for my express in the Airport Admin Utility, I have it checked off to distribute IP addresses to airport client computers by "Sharing a single IP address (using DHCP and NAT)."

How does this differ from distributing a range of IP addresses? I thought each computer had to have its own IP address, how can it share the same one? When both the imac and ibook are connected, they show unique IP addresses in the Network Preferences pane. How is it sharing a single IP address?

Click to expand...

Normally a home customer only gets one DHCP address from their ISP - your router gives all your computers a bunch of private addresses (NAT), and manages the traffic flow back and forth. But it is also possible to own a block of IP addresses. Your ISP owns a whole lot of them, for instance. If you owned the netblock 128.95.120.1 - 128.95.120.255, for example, you could distribute some of those using your Airport Extreme base station (assuming you had your DNS set up for that, and in this case assuming you are the University of Washington).