What you need to know about an I.P address

One day I was travelling in Turkey looking for the Aya Sofia, I was lost, my iPhone's battery was pretty much flat, and no one could speak English and my rough flat Capetonian accent wasn't any help for the locals to understand what I was saying either.  

An I.P address is very much similar to how client computers communicate, and if we don't have them, we can't communicate period!

In this section below I'll discuss the most important things you need to know about an I.P address.

An I.P address can also be called a logical address, why is that? Because they change from network to network. It is not a physical address, let's just say the device you are reading this article on has a certain I.P and let's imagine for a second your mates inviting you over to their place and you connect to their WIFI, your I.P will change because it is not physical it is logical.

They have 2 versions I.Pversion4 and IPversion6. Version 4 is 32bit and we have been using them for a long time. It is 32bit which means it has 4 OCTETs so each one of those OCTET's are 8 bits. IPv6 is 128 bit and this is based on hexadecimal annunciation. It is like the new thing right even though we have been using it for a few years now because technology hasn't caught up with it yet maybe in the next 2-3 years from when this article is being typed out. One thing that I know is ISP's are already implementing IPv6 because, we don't have anymore IPv4's.

Another thing that came to my mind is one's and zero's. Binary language.

The decimal number range for these binary numbers can go up to is 255 and the lowest number is 0. When the Octet is turned on it is 255 and when it is turned off it is 0.

Imagine the road that you live on is 5th avenue and your house number is 55. Similarly, this is how you get to identify an I.P address's network i.d from the host i.d. Check below:

This is a class C private I.P address 192.168.1.55 and based on the default subnet mask 255.255.255.0 we can safely say that this is the network i.d and the zero is the host i.d.

So these are a few pointers to thing about when thinking about an I.P address.

Oh and b.t.w I did end up meeting up with a few South African students made new friends and they were heading to the same destination as I was. Now this was the most fun adventure and making new friends that became like family. Quite a story to tell for many years to come.