2.5. Identifying the Components and Structure of IP Addresses
In order to communicate effectively on a network, each device must be assigned a unique IP address. The IP address consists of two parts: a network address and a host address. You can think of the network address as a street name and the host address as a house on the street. As you can imagine, it would be very confusing for the mail carrier if multiple houses on the same street had the same number. In the same way, every host on a TCP/IP network must have a unique address for that network.
The IP addressing version that we use today is the same version that was developed in the early 1980s, IPv4. Since IPv4 offers more than 4 billion addressing possibilities, it was originally assumed ...
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