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John Berryman
Asked: 2010-12-10 09:33:35 +0800 CST

How are IP addresses assigned? What do the parts mean? [duplicate]

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Possible Duplicate:
How does Subnetting Work?
IP addresses and geographical locations

How does my IP address get assigned to me? Is there any ordering? For instance by time or by location or by queue? Who divvies up the IP addresses at each level, and what method do they use?

What do the individual parts of the IP address mean? (ex. 72.14.204.99) Does it move from least geographically specific at the left to most at the right?

I'm especially interested in understand the correlation between geographic location and IP address.

ip-address network-protocols

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    They don't really mean anything. There are certain reserved blocks, which are good to know

    The following are reserved for "private" networks. These only ever apply in LAN/WAN environments.

    • 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
    • 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
    • 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255

    The following addresses only ever apply to the local machine (the Loopback addresses):

    • 127.0.0.0-127.255.255.255 (addresses other than 127.0.0.1 are seldom used).

    The 0.0.0.0 block is reserved for the "default route", for routing purposes.

    Inversely 1.1.1.1 and 255.255.255.255 is used to signify broadcasting on all routes.

    The 169.254.0.0 -169.254.255.255 block is reserved for Automatic Private IP Addressing

    There are a number of other addresses that are reserved for INCAN, ARIN, etc. A partial list can be found here.

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