GregJ
I've been reading for a week and have achieved information overload trying to understand a basic routing concept. I hope this is not too much of an inappropriate forum for my pre-configuration question. Ultimately, I just want the server on my home LAN to host some files copied from family members' computers (that aren't in my house) without paying for a static IP address. OpenVPN seems like it would provide a super-simple interface from a client end-user's point of view.
I have a U-verse box as my router. I am using http://www.startssl.net's DNS Network feature so that people on the internet that want to access my host computer can get to it via a DNS lookup of gregsWebDomain.com. When I run an app on my computer, it records my IP address with startssl.net (presumably, actually my router's IP address, since the outside world doesn't know my computer's IP address). When it is time to copy a file, a client out on the Internet will initiate some sort of request, ultimately to my host computer.
How does the router, and how can I make the router, know to pipe that request to my host computer rather than one of my non-host computers (all on my LAN)? Does it broadcast to all the computers on the LAN, hoping only 1 will respond? If there's more information, such as a port number, associated with an IP address other than the IPV4 numbers, I am unaware of it.
Once I understand that, then I will want to set up OpenVPN. Is there a tutorial for this specific kind of setup? I've noticed there's lots of terminology in setting up OpenVPN for which I have too weak of an understanding.
Thanks!
