Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

IP network objects

When working with an IP address that represents a network, we could work with an IPv4Network or IPv6Network object depending on the IP address passed as the argument. For this task, we can use the ip_network() method from the ipaddress module using as parameter a string or integer representing the IP network.

Let's import the ipaddress module and define a net6 network:

 >>> import ipaddress >>> net6 = ipaddress.ip_network('2001:db8::/48')

Now, we get some useful information, such as version, netmask, and the network/broadcast address:

>>> net6.version 6>>> net6.netmask IPv6Address('ffff:ffff:ffff::')

Similarly, you can find the network and the broadcast addresses of net6 by doing the following:

 >>> net6.network_address ...