Networking

A typical home network setup

Let's start by looking at a typical home network after your local internet provider has set you up.  A typical home network will have the following three components: the internet, your ISP modem, and your home network with all your devices.

Note: this article is applicable to home and small business network architecture

Introduction

I cleverly preempted your first question ("why the heck are you making it so complicated, no-one is trying to compromise my network anyway") by including "over-engineered" in the title... :)