Understanding networking is a fundamental part of configuring complex environments on the internet. This has implications when trying to communicate between servers efficiently, developing secure network policies, and keeping your nodes organized. Every location or device on a network must be addressable. This is simply a term that means that it can be reached by referencing its designation under a predefined system of addresses. In the normal TCP/IP model of network layering, this is handled on a few different layers, but usually, when we refer to an address on a network, we are talking about an IP address. IP addresses allow network resources to be reached through a network interface. If one computer wants to communicate with another computer, …show more content…
The first part of the address is used to identify the network that the address is a part of. The part that comes afterwards is used to specify a specific host within that network. Where the network specification ends and the host specification begins depends on how the network is configured. IPv4 addresses were traditionally divided into five different "classes", named A through E, meant to differentiate segments of the available addressable IPv4 space. These are defined by the first four bits of each address. You can identify what class an IP address belongs to by looking at these bits. The process of dividing a network into smaller network sections is called subnetting. This can be useful for many different purposes and helps isolate groups of hosts together and deal with them easily. As what was discussed above, each address space is divided into a network portion and a host portion. The amount the address that each of these take up is dependent on the class that the address belongs to. For instance, for class C addresses, the first 3 octets are used to describe the network. For the address 192.168.0.15, the 192.168.0 portion describes the network and the 15 describes the host. By default, each network has only one subnet, which contains all of the host addresses defined within. A netmask is basically a specification of the amount of address bits that are used for the network portion. A subnet mask is another