Private
IP Address – What is a Private IP Address?
An IP
address is equivalent to your postal address and just like the mail service,
each computer has an address so that it will only receive
the information that is send by someone else.
Your IP
Addresses are represented as 192.168.1.7 as this is the system that is
understood by computers. The address is split into 4 parts known as “octets”
and each of the octets can be numbered from 0-255, providing a total of
4,294,967,296 potentially unique IP Addresses.
Now,
while 4.2 Billion might seem, But ISPs and large Universities that have been
reserved ip address for special purposes and are not usable, so the real amount
is less than 4.2 billion.
As I
mention earlier some blocks of addresses had been reserved for special
purposes, one of these purposes was for private networking and it is these
private addresses.
Private
IP address ranges
The
ranges and the amount of usable IP’s are as follows:
10.0.0.0
– 10.255.255.255
Addresses:
16,777,216
172.16.0.0
– 172.31.255.255
Addresses:
1,048,576
192.168.0.0
– 192.168.255.255
Addresses:
65,536
So, what
are these addresses and how do they work?
For
example, if I had 6 computers that I wanted to connect to network, I might
number them from 192.168.0.1 up to 192.168.0.6 and this would still leave over
a million more addresses that I could use if I were to buy some more computers
or if I was networking a large office and needed lots and lots of addresses.
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