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Networking 101: Understanding IP Addresses

Networks don't work without addresses: Whenever you are sending something, you need to specify where it should go and where it came from. To be an effective network engineer or administrator, you need to understand IP addresses backward and forward: you need to be able to think on your feet. If something breaks, likely as not some address assignment has been screwed up. And spotting the problem quickly is likely to be the difference between being the hero, or the guy who "takes a long time to fix the problem." Before covering subnetting in the next Networking 101 installment, we'd like to thoroughly explore IP addresses in their primal form. This is crucial to understanding subnets.

IPv4 Addresses and 32-bit Numbers
IP addresses are just 32-bit binary numbers, but they're important binary numbers: you need to how to work with them. When working with subnet masks, new network administrators generally get confused with the ones they haven't memorized. All the subnet mask amounts to is moving the boundary between the part of the address that represents a "network" and the part that represents a "host." Once you're comfortable with this method of thinking about IP addresses and masks, you've mastered IP addressing. Networking 101: Understanding IP Addresses

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