whats a ip pool

hello

as i newbie i got loadsa questions that id like answering..but most of these ill find answers to in other posts

what it is i been getting alerts in my firewall (i get told most of these are legitimate traffic) but as i read through these forums ive tryed one of those whois websites and the ips that i check are from various places but a commom factor is they all say there ip pools or something(sorry i cant be more pacific)

what is an ip pool????

i have recieived one of these from my service provider...which i thought nothing of(as i dont do anything illegal on my pc so dont care if my ip mointors what i do)

but what aroused my suspicions is when i started gettin these ip pool thingys of isp's i dont or never have used

any ideas???? also could someone help me on how to understand what these whois websites are tryin to tell me????? as i have noticed that no one gives instructions for the complete thicko (me)

cheers

waterboy

I think IP pools are group IP addresses that are setup for workgroups and things like servers. Hummm..... sounds to me like you were tracking a router or something. Of course I could be wrong about all of the above^.

IP pools are used on proxies to proxy traffic, and can also be used for NATing on Routers.

When traffic leaves your machine, sometimes you will be going through a proxy. The proxy acts as a middleman, and you never actually make a "direct" connection to stuff on the Internet, the proxy simply forwards your traffic for you.

Now, the proxy may be setup with an IP pool, which are the number of cource IP addresses the proxy can send traffic from, and your particular traffic could pick up any out of the pool.

Eg.

- Your computer has a source IP of 1.1.1.1
- The proxy has an IP pool of 3 ip addresses, 1.1.1.2, 1.1.1.3, 1.1.1.4.
- Traffic leaves your machine with a source IP of 1.1.1.1 and connectes with the proxy.
- You send all internet requests to the proxy, where the proxies outbound connection is assigned a source IP Address from the IP pool.

Note that the security reasoning behind this is that your computers IP address can only be obtained by sniffing the traffic between yourself and the proxy. Your IP address is masked once it leaves the proxy.

NATing works in a similiar fashion, but is used to route traffic from internal and public IP addresses.

Anyone, feel free to make any additions or corrections. I may have left a few things out!!

thanks chaps/chapesses

i done a whois on my ip and got a pool aswell

cheers for the info

waterboy

Do a google search for DHCP my friend. You'll get the idea.