This short article outlines how to read an ip address. All computer who are connected to the internet have an IP Address. For example the following is the IP Address of www.amazon.com:
72.21.206.5
In the case of this Amazon IP address it is actually a virtual ip address as it hides the multitude of servers that Amazon use to respond to web page requests. But for our purposes we only want to know how to read the address.
IP Address in Decimal And Binary Notation
The above IP address is expressed in decimal or “dotted” form. A computer will actually use the binary form of the address which for this address is:
01001000.00010101.11001110.00000101
The four numbers that you see in an IP address are called octets. This is because they each have eight numbers or positions when expressed in binary form.
In total an IP address in binary form has 32 numbers each of which can take the value 0 or 1.
For each octet the total number of different combinations is 2 to the power of 8 or 255 values. So each octet can contain the values 0 up to 255.
For example the address 255.255.255.255 is used for network broadcasts.
In order to become an expert in reading IP addresses you really need to understand binary to decimal conversion. This will be covered in a later post. In the meantime knowing the different types of Ip address class will certainly help.
IP Address Classes
There are different classes of IP address. The IP address is seen as having two parts – a part used to identify the network and a part used to identify the host or computer on that network. In the examples below the n stands for network bit and the h stands for host bit.
Class A – 0nnnnnnn.hhhhhhhh.hhhhhhhh.hhhhhhhh ,
first bit is 0, 7 network bits, 24 host bits. In this case there can be 126 networks and each network can contain up approx 17 million hosts. So you can see that this class is used for large networks.
Class B – 10nnnnnn.nnnnnnnn.hhhhhhhh.hhhhhhhh ,
first two bits 10, 14 network bits, 16 host bits. Each B class can have 65,532 hosts. In this case there can be 16,384 networks and approx 65,000 hosts per network. This class is used for medium sized networks.
Class C – 110nnnnn nnnnnnnn nnnnnnnn hhhhhhhh , first three bits 110, 21 network bits, 8 host bits. This is typically used for LANs (local area networks). Each C class can have 254 hosts
Class D – 1110mmmm.mmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmm , first four bits 1110, 28 multicast bits. These are multicast addresses.
Class E – 1111rrrr.eeeeeeee.eeeeeeee.eeeeeeee , first four bits 1111, 28 reserved bits. This class is reserved for experimental use.
Follow this link to finds out what a Default IP Address is.
I hope that this article has helped you, at least to some extent, learn how to read ip addresses.
