Computer Networks – 2 – What is an IP address ? Master Spark
Assalam u alaikum, i am muhammad hamad and my channel is master spark
What? You don’t know what an IP address is used for?
Don’t worry. Most of the billions of computer users don’t know either, and to tell you the truth, that’s perfectly alright. Because even though it’s your passport to the Internet, you never have to think about it.
IP Addressing and SocketsWe humans identify each other by our names and surnames. The human brain finds it easy to remembernames.
However, that’s not the case with computers.
Computers don’t understand human language, nor canthey communicate with each other by calling out names as humans do.
So, in simple terms, an IP (InternetProtocol) address is nothing but a unique number that computers use to identify and communicate with eachother.
Because, in the same way you to need a mailing address to recieve a letter in the mail from a friend, a remote computer needs your aIP address to communicate with your computer
The first widely used version of IP was IP V4; let’s see what an IP V4 address looks like:XXX . XXX . XXX . XXX0-255 0-255 0-255 0-255An IP V4 address has four places separated by three decimals. Each place can have any value rangingfrom 0 to 255, as shown in
What went wrong?
The past decade has seen explosive growth in mobile devices including mobile phones, notebook computers, and wireless handheld devices. The format for IPv4 wasn’t designed to handle the sheer number of IP addresses
Remember, within a network, there can never be two or more systems with the same IP address. Eachsystem is always identified by a unique IP address.To see your private IP address, do the following:• In Windows, open a command prompt and enter ipconfig /all• In Linux, open a terminal and type the command ifconfigTo check your public IP address on either operating system:• Open www.whatismyip.com in your favorite browser
Private IP and Public IPConsider an example of a company having a main branch office and 50 employees at work. The companycan’t afford to get a separate telephone connection for each employee, so it gets a single telephone line andshares it among all employees using extensions. The same concept is used in the computing world. If thereare multiple computers that have to be connected to the Internet, getting a separate Internet connection foreach of them would not be feasible and cost-effective. Instead, a single Internet connection is taken and thenshared among multiple computers.So when you get an Internet connection, you actually get a public IP address, and this public IP addressis shared among multiple computers by using private IP addresses. Thus a company pays only for a singlepublic IP and shares it among many private IPs, which are free to use.The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has provided clear guidelines on which IP addressescan be used as public and which ones as private
2128 = 655,570,793,348,866,943,898,599
ip address
