From the course: Learning Subnetting

IPv4 address structure overview

From the course: Learning Subnetting

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

IPv4 address structure overview

“

- In this module, we're going to get into the structure of an IP version 4 address. We're going to talk about the different classes of IP addresses. We'll distinguish between a private IP address and a public IP address. But before we get going, I thought I would share with you using a metaphor, the structure of an IP version 4 address. Think of an IP version 4 address as a string of 32 bits, like this. Here is a string, and imagine that we have 32 bits in this string. And what we can do is draw a dividing line somewhere within those 32 bits to say these are network bits and these are host bits. So let's just cut this string in two, and I'll tie a knot to interconnect our network bits and our host bits. That should hold. So now, we've got this string and we've got a portion of the bits that are network bits, and a portion that are host bits, and we're going to have a default dividing line position depending on what class of IP address we have, but here's what we're going to do with subnetting in this course. We're going to see that this dividing line can move. If we need more networks, in other words, we need to create some subnets, we can take this dividing point and we can simply move it down. So now, we've got lots more network bits, but just a few host bits. If we need more hosts, we can go in the opposite direction. We can have more host bits and fewer network bits. Now, let's get into our discussion of IP version 4 formatting.

Contents