What is IP Address | What is my IP Address
What is my IP Address?
The Internet Protocol or IP address is a unique digital tag allotted
to every electronic or digital device which is connected to the Internet. There
are primarily two main functions of IP which are host or network interface
identification and location addressing.
The most common analogy for an IP address is the postal service. For the postal service to work every house needs to have its own unique address and if you need to send a letter, not that anyone sends letters anymore you need to write the destination address on the envelope. That way when you send the letter the postman knows exactly where to deliver it now the address must be unique. Otherwise, your post could end up going to somebody else or you could start receiving somebody else's post and that can sometimes not go so well. Computers work in the same way.
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| Computers in the Network need an IP address. |
Each computer in a network needs to have a unique address called an IP address and when sending data to a computer, just like letters we need to add the destination address. We also need to include a return address so they know where to reply
Types
There are two types of IP addresses: Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
- Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4)
Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4 was initially introduced by Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in the year 1983. In IPv4 each device is assigned a unique 32-bit address which means it contains 32 binary digits and these digits are written in human-readable language for example 192.168.32.152 as shown in the figure:
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| IPv4 is a 32-bit address. |
IPv4 contains four sections which are called octets. These octets are separated by dots or periods. Each octet in theory can contain any number between 0 and 255 Why 255? well, our 32-bit number is separated into four lots of eight, and 255 is the largest number that can be made from eight bits.
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| IPv4 contains four sections which are called octets. |
Now the address itself is separated into two parts, the first part represents the network and the second part represents the host. To know which part of the IP address represents the network, we used to rely on the first few binary bits but since the early 90s, we have had something called a subnet mask.
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| Subnet mask, Host, and Network address. |
A subnet mask is always paired with an IP address and is used to identify the address's network section and the host section. In its simplest form whenever you see 255 this is the network part of the address whenever you see a 0 this is the host part of the address. It can get a bit more complicated than that but we'll look at that later on down the line. When learning about networks and hosts and what they mean, it's good to think of it as your address. You shared the same street name as your neighbors but it's the house number that makes your address unique. On the other hand, you can also have multiple streets with the same house number. And it's the same with computer networks. Instead of street addresses, you have network numbers and instead of house numbers, you have host numbers.
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| House number analogy with IPv4 address. |
Here we have two networks 192.168.5.0 and 192.168.10.0 both with a subnet of 255.255.255.0. When talking about networks as a whole, you often just use 0 for the host section. Inside our networks, we have our hosts .1 .2, and 3. It's common in a network diagram to just show the host section of the address if you already know the network section. In fact, these IP addresses would be 192.168.5.1, 192.168.5.2, and so on, and so on. So with all of that in mind if we have some data to send to 192.168.5.3 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 where would we send it? Well if we look at the subnet mask we can see that the network is 192.168.5 So we know that three is our host number so we send it over to the host in the network on the left
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| Subnet Mask of IPv4 address. |
Hopefully that all makes sense so far. Back in the early days of IP, it was decided to split all of the available addresses into groups and these groups were called classes. The idea was to make address allocation scalable. The main ones are Class A, Class B, and Class C. There is also Class D for something called multicast addresses, and Class E which is reserved for experimental use. We're going to focus on the first three. Each class has a range of IP addresses.
Class A addresses are between 1.0.0.0 to 126.255.255.255 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0 Class B addresses are between 128.0.0.0 to 191.255.255.255 where the subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and Class C addresses are between 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Phew! After that never want to say 255 again! So this was all to control the number of hosts available on each network. Class A has three octets available for host allocation this means we can have 16,777,214 hosts for a single-class network. Massive, massive networks!
Class B has two available octets for host allocation so we can only have 65,534 hosts in a single Class B Network. Still a very, very big number! Class C only has one available octet for host allocation. So this means we can get 254 hosts per single Class C Network.
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| Classes and their ranges in IPv4 addresses. |
So you need to be able to look at an IP address and know which class it belongs to easiest way to do this is to memorize the first octet. If an IP starts with the number 10 straight away, you know it's a class A network. If it starts with 192 you know it's Class C and so on, but there's a problem. The problem is no one could have predicted the massive explosion of computers and the Internet. In fact, there is no more unallocated IP version 4 addresses left. This is why the new IP version 6 has been designed It will give us more than enough IP addresses for absolutely everyone but fear not! there is a solution to help prolong the life of IP version 4.
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| Private vs Public IP address. |
The solution is to carve out small sections from all three classes and call them private IP addresses. All other addresses are known as public addresses. They still use the same subnet mask for that class and they can still have the same number of hosts. The difference is where public IP addresses need to be unique, private addresses can be used over and over and over again, thus saving millions or billions of public IP addresses. This is how it works. Let's say this is your house. You have a PC a phone and a printer. You can choose any private IP range that you want to use. In this case, we will choose Class C 192.168.1.0 and we'll assign our IP addresses. Remember this is a Class C Network and the default subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 meaning 192.168.1.0 is our network address and the last number is our host address.
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| Example of IP address in Real life scenario. |
So all of our devices can talk to each other without any problems at all. The beauty of private IP addresses is that they can be used by anyone. For example, your neighbors might also be using the same IP addresses as you are. And that's fine, private IP addresses only need to be unique within your own network. There is a catch though, private IP addresses cannot be used over the Internet Otherwise we would have duplicate IP addresses everywhere and data would never end up getting to the correct places. For that reason, only public IP addresses can be used over the Internet. These must be unique. When you sign up with your internet service provider, they will issue you with a public IP address that you can use over the Internet. Usually, they give you just one address not a block of 65,000 or 254...1! This helps prolong the life of ipv4 because instead of using an IP address for every one of our six devices we are only using two public addresses. The way our devices will communicate to the internet through their public IP is by using something called Network Address Translation, which again we will cover in a separate article or post.
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| Windows PowerShell type ipconfig example. |
Before we finish this Post, I will show you how to check your own IP addresses at home on On Windows you simply open a command prompt or PowerShell type ipconfig to see your interface settings find your interface, you might have more than one if you have wireless, and you'll be able to see your IP address and subnet mask.
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| Linux or Apple computers open a terminal and type ifconfig. |
For Linux or Apple, computers open a terminal and type ifconfig and you should see the same information to view your public IP address simply go to the top of the article and you will see your public IP address.
In 2011 almost 17 million IPv4 addresses have been assigned by IANA. Only a single regional Internet registry in Africa has some availability of IPV4 addresses. Very few IPv4 addresses are held in reserve for private networks which are not worldwide unique.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
The increase in the number of connected devices inforced the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to move towards the next version named the "Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)" in the year 1998. The Internet Protocol version 6 or IPv6 was standardized in 1998 by IETF is a 128-bit IP address like 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1, used since 2001 to cope with the scarcity of the IPv4 addresses currently controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and by five regional Internet registries (RIRs). Network administrators allocate an IP address to every machine which is connected to their network. These allocations may be static or dynamic conditional to the network’s configurations and policies.
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Noctorous is a professional engineer with vast and broad experience finding out the solution to the problems to serve the people free of cost.
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