April 2004
Intermediate to advanced
864 pages
20h 58m
English
The IP version 4 (IPv4) addressing scheme of 32 bits, which is subdivided into classes based on the values of the first three high-order bits, must have seemed like overkill to the original pioneers of IP, because it theoretically supports over 4.2 billion unique addresses. Significant numbers of addresses are lost to the mechanics of IP, however, which renders two addresses for every subnet unusable (network and broadcast addresses). Additional addresses are lost to special classes, leaving only approximately 3.2 billion addresses available for use.
In the early days of the Internet, this was a significant number, but then the Internet started to become more and more popular, threatening to quickly ...
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