Please ELI5.
In: Technology
An IP address is a way that a computer, or anything that has network capabilities identifies where it is. The address, like your home address analogy is a good one.. But it’s not 100% accurate. More so: inside your actual house you can have all the IP addresses you want in the world. Inside your actual house are all of your private IPs… But you can’t access the internet with them. Instead something called Network Address Translation (NAT) literally translates ALL of you private IP addresses into a single public IP which is provided by your Internet Service Provider. This public IP is truly unique and nobody else in the world has them.. And about once a month or so your ISP will assign you a new one.. Usually without you even knowing it happened.
You have some other addresses that help make your network function.. For example.. Another special address that all networked appliances have is a Media Access Control Address, or more commonly known as a MAC Address. The MAC address is the physical address (so more accurate to your home address analogy because the MAC tells the network where the device lives…. Basically) the MAC is often referred to as the physical address and it can never be changed on a device. It’s most frequently used for determining which device is asking the Default Gateway for an automatically signed private IP address.
The default Gateway is usually called a router. The router is responsible for literally routing packets of data in and out of the network. At that point it basically functions as a literal gateway in and out of the house. When you are configuring your computer, the default gateway’s IP address is the same as the routers address. In most residential applications, the router has a bunch of other functionalities though, such as handling DHCP, DNS NAT, interior packet switching, and usually they have a firewall built into them. Since you didn’t ask about those, I won’t go into it
Finally, subnets. These are the trickiest thing to understand and to be honest I USED to be good at them but I’ve never used them in my work because we just VLAN segregate so why go through the trouble to do the math to actually subnet.. But that’s neither here nor there.
Subnets at the surface level are how you tell a computer or network device how many private IP addresses can exist on the same IP block segment. For example 255.255.255.0 subnet is considered a class C internal IP schema and can handle 254 private addresses on the same IP block (it would be 256 but the .0 and .255 addresses are reserved). 255.255.0.0 is considered a class B and can handle about 65,000 devices. Whereas a class A (255.0.0.0) can handle approximately 16.7 million devices.
On a deeper level each IPv4 address is made up of for groups of 8 bits which coincide to produce a number.. For a total of 32 bits in the IP. If you’re utilizing a class C. The default subnet is 255.255.255.0. Then let’s say that your private IP is 192.168.0.2. 192.168 is the network that you are on..0 is the block segment, and .2 is your actual address in this case. If you know that you only want to have.. Let’s say 16 devices on your IP block segment. Then you can do the math to figure out, based on the number of bits that are off in your IP.. To determine a new subnet to be on. (I say do the math because I can’t remember the math.. Sorry) after that. Your subnet would become something like 255.255.255.12 and your new valid IP block would be 192.168.0.1-.17 because at that point .17 would be your broadcast IP and. 0 would still be your loopback (that’s not really important for this scope) at that point the next valid range would be 192.168.0.18-254. and you have successfully subnetted your network.
I hope that helps.. Feel free to ask me to elaborate more or to clarify something
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