On 6/6/08, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm trying to get a grasp on IP addressing concepts.
It really helps if you think about it in binary. An IP address is four groups of 8 bits: 00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000 It's only converted into decimal to make it easier to read. A subnet mask (for example) of 255.255.255.192 would look like this in binary: 11111111.11111111.11111111.11000000 You can see how that "masks" the first 26 bits, which also corresponds to putting a "/26" at the end of an IP address. > For example: 63.98.246.161/8? That just means that it's a host IP of 63.98.246.161 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0 (the first 8 bits masked). The slashes are just a handy way of putting both an IP and a mask into the same string; usually that's used to indicate a subnet. Since your particular string masks out everything but the first 8 bits, in most cases it will be functionally identical to any other subnet referred to by 63.x.x.x/8. Sometimes such a pair is used to represent a gateway and subnet mask together, in which case the gateway's specific IP is significant. -- Brad Beyenhof http://augmentedfourth.com Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. ~ Sydney Smith, English essayist and preacher (1771-1845) -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
