IP Addressing and Terminology

IP ADDRESSING

An IP addressing is a numeric idenitifier assigned to each machine on an ip network. ..It designates the specific location of a device on the network. An IP address is a software address not a hardware address. It is hard-coded on a network interface card (NIC) and used to finding host a local network.

    IP addressing was designed to allow hosts on one network to communicate with a host on different network regardless of the type of LANs th host are participating in.

IP TERMINOLOGY

Here you will learn several important terms vital to your understanding of the internet protocol. Here are a few to get started with.

Bit   A bit is one digit, either a 1 or a 0

Byte  A byte is 7 or 8 bit, depending on whether parity is used. Assuming a byte is 8 bits.

Octet  An octet, made up of 8 bits, is just an ordinary s-bit binary number.

Network Address This is the designation used in routing to send packets to a remote network - for example 10.10.10.0, 172.16.0.0, and 192.160.10.0.

Broadcast Address  This is the address use by applications and hosts to send information to all nodes on a network is called a broadcast address. Example 255.255.255.255, which is all networks, all nodes, 172.16.255.255, which is all subnets and hosts on network 172.16.0.0 and 10.255.255.255, which broadcast to all subnets and hosts on network 10.0.0.0

THE HIERARCHICAL IP ADDRESSING

         An IP address consists of 32 bit of information. These bits are divided in four sections, reffered to as octets or bytes, each containing 1 bytes (8bits).

NOTE 11111111.11111111.11111111.11111111 This is 32 bits, in which each octet is containing 8 bits. 1111111 is 8 bits which is also equal to 1 bytes and vice versa. 8 can be represented in binary as 11111111.

      

 You can depict an IP using one of the three methods:

•  Dotted decimal, as in 172.16.30.56
•  Binary, as in 10101100.00010000.00011110.00111000
•  Hexa decimal as in AC.10.IE.38

All these examples truely represent the same IP address. Hexadecimal isn't used as often as dotted-decimal or binary when IP addressing is disscussed, but you still might find an IP address stored in hexadecimal in some programs. The Windows Registry is a good example of a program that stores a machine's IP address in hex.

NOTE  Bit are either 1 or 0 where 1 represent the number of bit that are turned on and 0 represent the number of bit that are turned off.