【My Study Note】IP Address
IP Address
On a LAN (Local Area Network), nodes can communicate with each other through their physical MAC addresses. This works well on a small scale because switches can quickly learn the MAC addresses connected to each other ports to forward transmissions appropriately.
But MAC addressing isn’t preferable for the large scale. Although every single network interface on the planet has a unique MAC address, they aren’t ordered in any systematic way which means there is no way of knowing where on the earth a specific MAC address might be at any one point in time.
Therefore, the network layer comes into play, and the IP(Internet Protocol) addresses come along with it.
IP Address
IP addresses are 32-bit long numbers made up of four octets, and each octet is normally described in decimal numbers.
8 bits of data or a single octet can represent all decimal numbers from 0 to 255.
123.456.789.100: Not Valid (It has numbers larger than could be represented by 8 bits. 456 and 789 is over than 255. It should be less than 255)
This format is known as dotted decimal notation.
Why IP Address is better than Mac Address?
IP addresses are distributed in large sections to various organizations and companies instead of being determined by hardware vendors. This means that IP addresses are more hierarchical and easier to store data about than physical addresses are.
Example
Think of IBM, which owns every single IP that has the number 9 as the first octet. At a very high level, this means that if an Internet router needs to figure out where to send a data packet intended for the IP address 9.0.0.1, that router only has to know to get it to one of IBM’s routers. That router can handle the rest of the delivery process from there.
Difference between Mac and IP Address
It’s important to call out that IP addresses belong to the networks, not the devices attached to those networks. So your laptop will always have the same MAC address no matter where you use it, but it will have a different IP address assigned to it at an Internet cafe than it would when you’re at home.
The LAN at the Internet cafe or the LAN at your house would each be individually responsible for handing out an IP address to your laptop if you power it on there.
How to connect to IP Address?
On a day-to-day basis, getting an IP address is usually a pretty invisible process. But for now, remember that on many modern networks you can connect a new device and an IP address will be assigned to it automatically through a technology known as dynamic host configuration protocol.
An IP address assigned this way is known as a dynamic IP address. The opposite of this is known as a static IP address, which must be configured on a node manually.
In most cases, static IP addresses are reserved for servers and network devices, while dynamic IP addresses are reserved for clients. But there are certain situations where this might not be true.