I kinda get how it makes sense on a local network, because it’s kinda like a list of the devices that are connected to it and your trying to communicate with other machines connected together in that same list. But this feels like a really surface level understanding and I don’t know what I’m missing.
I understand that they’re a string of 4 digits from 1-255, such as 192.168.1.1 being really common for home networks. But I don’t know what the numbers each mean. I think 192 in this case is a reserved value for home use? Same with 10? And the last number is basically the number of the device on the network I think. But I don’t understand the numbers for x.168.1.x
What I really don’t understand is how public IPs work. You hear online about not leaking or sharing your public IP or it can be used to find (pretty close to) where you live. How? How are they assigned to the billions of connected devices in the world?
I’ve been watching videos about trying to set up a FOSS router because it’s really interesting, but IPs seem like dark magic to me
In: Technology
This is where your internet provider comes in. They are the ones who assign you a public IP. Nations reserve large blocks of IP addresses and assign them to companies, who assign them to you. That way, a request that gets sent from you to your ISP can be then sent to another ISP, based on who that IP address should belong to. If Comcast has a big block (73.x.x.x for example), other companies know to send those requests to Comcast, who uses their internal servers to route the request to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Registry_for_Internet_Numbers
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