Microsoft® Windows Server 2003: Administrator’s Companion

IP Addresses and What They Mean

Your IP address is to the Internet (or to the other computers on your local network) much the same as your street address is to your mail carrier. It uniquely identifies your computer using a simple, 32-bit addressing scheme. This scheme, which originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, uses four octets separated by dots, in the form w.x.y.z (these letters represent each octet throughout the chapter), to describe both the network’s address and the local machine’s address on that network. Each octet is represented by a single decimal number but is called an octet because it requires eight bits to describe.

In terms of IP addresses, all networks fall into one of three classes: A, B, or C. These different classes ...