Patent ID: 8077632

Claim:
An apparatus configured to automatically determine a network connection on a port, the apparatus comprising: a first port of the apparatus located between a device on a wide area network (WAN) and a server on a local area network (LAN), the device connected to a client, the first port electrically connected to receive network traffic via the WAN, the first port comprising an Ethernet port; a second port of the apparatus electrically connected to receive network traffic via the LAN, the second port comprising an Ethernet port, the apparatus having not yet identified to which of a network segment of the WAN or the LAN is the first port connected; a processor of the apparatus configured to: execute instructions to monitor network traffic on the first port and the second port to detect whether any packet received is a SYN or a SYN-ACK packet, identify, in response to detecting that a SYN-ACK packet from the client was received from the device, that the SYN-ACK packet was received on the first port and that the first port is connected to the WAN; automatically assign, responsive to identifying that the SYN-ACK packet was received on the first port, to the first port a function for processing communications for the network segment of the WAN connected to the first port, forward, by the apparatus, the SYN-ACK packet from the client to the server; identify, in response to detecting that a SYN packet was received from the server, that the SYN packet was received on the second port and that the second port is connected to the LAN; automatically assign to the second port a function for processing communications for the network segment of the LAN connected to the second port; and operate on subsequent packets arriving on the first port in accordance with the function assigned to the first port.