What is an IP Address?

Before you can understand and administer DHCP I have to make sure you understand at a basic level what an IP Address is.

So, in this lecture, you are going to be getting a high-level overview of what an IP Address is and how it is used to transmit data across a network.

An IP Address is very similar to a business address, you think of it in that form where you have a couple of different groups of elements, you combine them together, and you have a complete business address. For our case, we are combining a group of octets and we have an IP Address.

So, right here we have a street address, city, state, zip code. Those are all combined to make a business address.

Over here in the middle, we have our different octets which are combined together, and these form an IP Address. So, an IP Address is made up of four octets, octet 1, octet 2, octet 3, and octet 4, and these octets are joined with a period or a dot.

So, here at the right is an example of what IP Addresses might look like 192.168.1.1, or 10.0.0.0.

Each one of these octets is a number from 0 to 255, so as long as you specify any number from 0 to 255 you are going to have an IP Address that is valid.

So, you might be wondering, why 255? Why is that the limit?

Well, the reason is that octets are 8-bit numbers, and if you remember your binary, the maximum 8-bit value is 255.

So, these 4 octets that contain 8-bits combine together into a 32-bit IP Address, 4 x 8 = 32, so that’s how you come up with a 32-bit IP Address.

Now, if your brain is exploding and that’s crazy to you, don't worry about it. This is not necessary at all, but if you are interested in networking…