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 UWA week 18 (1st semester, week 9) ↓
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9:07pm Sat 4th May, ANONYMOUS

Hello, I was just reviewing lecture 7 (and internet sources) and was a little confused about what seems to be the shared purpose/role of private IPs and mac addresses. From what I understand, public IP's are globally unique to allow for accurate sending of packets to correct destinations. And the role of private IP's seems to be used to address different devices on the same network e.g. home router (not necessarily globally unique but assigned uniquely to each device on the network). But I thought the mac addresses role was the same, too address devices uniquely on the same network (LAN). Continuing from this, if a wanted to send a file from my phone to my computer on my home network, it would send a ARP request attached with the private IP of the computer. The home router gets this ARP request and sends it out to the devices on the network. The computer gets the ARP requests and sends back its mac address (through the router to the sender), so that then the sender can then send the file. Why point is, why not just send the file with the private IP, why do you need the mac in the first place if the private IP uniquely addresses the computer in the first place. Thanks and sorry for the large question.

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