Protocols
TCP/IP stands for transmission control protocol / internet protocol and is the way in which computers talk over the internet. It is routeable - meaning it can allow connections via many different paths to its ultimate destination.
What is needed
TCP/IP has two pieces of required information - a host address (your PC, printer, web site etc) and a network mask. The network mask tells you which bit of the address relates to the network (a group of local machines), and which relates to the host. If you want to be able to use TCP/IP over a large area you need a default gateway which tells the computer where to send traffic for which the destination computer is not known. |
| Your home networkThere are three network ranges that have been set aside for use by any network - they will never exist on the internet.
| Public C : | 192.168.x.x | 255.255.255.0 |
| Public B : | 172.16.x.x
to
172.31.x.x | 255.255.0.0 |
| Public A : | 10.x.x.x | 255.0.0.0 |
There is now another 'private' network known as the APIPA range - 192.169.x.x (255.255.0.0) which windows will assign to a DCHP configured interface for which no DHCP server responds to the configuration request. | |
Simple Masks
There are three common network masks 255.0.0.0, 255.255.0.0 and 255.255.255.0. They are often called Class A, B and C masks - This is wrong - the Class relates to the first number of the address not the mask.
Ignoring convention, a mask of 255.0.0.0 allows you to have 255 networks & 16,777,214 host addresses, a mask of 255.255.0.0 allows 65,536 networks & 65,534 hosts and a mask of 255.255.255.0 allows 16,777,216 networks and 253 hosts.
Classes and Binary
All TCP/IP addresses actually work in a binary implementation - a class A network has a network address that starts with 0(binary), a Class B starts with 10(binary) and a class C starts with 110(binary) |