IP Addresses
What if the U.S. telephone companies suddenly ran out of phone numbers? What kind of panic, if any, would it cause? Though nowhere near as dramatic, that was somewhat the situation facing many North American companies in the summer of 2015…mostly large technical companies that rely on the Internet and networks to survive. But it…
[Read More]Your IPv4 address is a series of numbers and dots, the string of numbers is separated by the dots into four sections, and not all IP addresses have the same number of digits. Your IP address identifies one computer, or one “host,” as they’re referred to on networks. Every device on a TCP/IP network has…
[Read More]When it comes to IP addressing, networking and just about everything else related to computing, it’s important to remember that everything that works behind the scenes is created for computers first, people second. For example, an IP address, which points to a designated computer or even a website, is designed to help computers—not computer users—…
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We figured that most visitors to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com don’t know a lot about IP topics — and why would they? For the most part, only people involved in IT (information technology) and computer networking need to think about what the IP in IP address stands for. Still, sometimes the terminology and jargon used (and rarely explained)…
[Read More]IP Addresses and Datagrams The IP protocol, which is one of several TCP/IP protocols, provides a hierarchal, hardware-independent addressing system—in other words, it’s the built-in networking software on computers that is needed for delivering data on a complex, routed network like the Internet. Although it’s the network adapter on a computer that has a unique…
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The “IP” part of IP address stands for “Internet Protocol.” The “address” part refers to a unique number that gets linked to all online activity you do…somewhat like a return address on a letter you’d send out. (All this happens in milliseconds.) That’s the end of today’s lesson. At least it should be. Because from…
[Read More]Here are the cold hard facts: An IP address is a 32-bit binary address. This 32-bit address is subdivided into four 8-bit segments called octets. Since only a fraction of people work with 32-bit binary addresses or even 8-bit binary octets (math and computer types), the IP address is almost always expressed in what’s called…
[Read More]We don’t “own” our IP address—for instance, it’s not like a homeowner’s address, which is linked to a piece of land and a building on it. Your IP address can change and it’s never really tied to your name or address, at least not in a way the public can see it. But this doesn’t…
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