Network management: IP address assignment and settings method

It is well known that in telephone communication, telephone users are identified by telephone numbers. Also, in order to distinguish different computers in the network, you need to assign a number to the computer, which is the "IP address."

What is an IP address

An IP address is a 32bit address assigned to each host connected to the Internet.

According to the TCP/IP (Transport control protocol/internet Protocol, Transmission Control Protocol/internet Protocols) protocol, the IP address is represented by binary, each IP address is 32bit long and the bit is converted to bytes. is 4 bytes. For example, a binary form of IP address is "00001010000000000000000000000001", such a long address, people to deal with too much effort. To facilitate the use of people, IP addresses are often written in decimal form, using the symbol "." In the middle. Separates different bytes. As a result, the IP address above can be expressed as "10.0.0.1". This notation for IP addresses is called dotted decimal notation, which is clearly much easier to remember than 1 and 0.

Some people would think that a computer can only have one IP address, this view is wrong. We can specify that a computer has more than one IP address, so when accessing the Internet, do not assume that an IP address is a computer; In addition, through specific technology, you can make multiple servers share an IP address, these servers in the user looks like a host.

How to assign an IP address

The TCP/IP protocol requires different settings for different networks, and each node typically requires an IP address, a subnet mask, and a default gateway. However, it is possible to assign an IP address to the client automatically through Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), avoid errors, and simplify the TCP/IP protocol settings.

So, how does the LAN assign IP address? The unification of IP addresses on the Internet is managed by an organization called the "IANA" (Internet assigned Numbers Authority, internet network number distribution agency).

Appendix: Range of IP addresses used in LAN



Due to the unreasonable distribution and the limitations of the IPV4 protocol itself, the IP address resources of the Internet are becoming more and more tense, in order to solve this problem, the IANA will retain part A, B and C IP address as the IP address space used in the LAN, and keep the IP range as shown in the schedule.



Reserved IP address segments are not used on the Internet, so routers that are connected to a WAN can isolate the data generated from the reserved IP address into the local area network by simply discarding the packet while processing the reserved IP address instead of routing it to the WAN.

The number of computers in the local area network is less than 254, in general, in the Class C IP address section of the choice of IP address range can be, such as from "192.168.1.1" to "192.168.1. 254 ".

How to set IP addresses

So how do you set an IP address? For example, in Windows Server, on the desktop, on the Network Neighborhood, right-click, click "Properties" in the pop-up menu, the "Network and dial-up Connections" window appears, right-click on "Local Area Connection", click "Properties" in the pop-up menu, and the "Local Connection Properties" window appears (see attached picture), double click " Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties window appears, and the IP address is entered in "Use IP address below", where we enter "192.168.12.145", and the subnet mask is "255.255.255.0".