What is Network Addressing?

Can anyone explain in simple terms?

How simple do you want? In the absolute simplest of terms, network addresses act like door numbers. They offer a method of addressing devices on a network. The most common method (and probably the one you're asking about) is IPv4, but telephone numbers and MAC addresses are other examples.

Reply 2

OnAndOff

Original post by AcseI

Could you say how they are used too? Including IP Networks and MAC Addresses like you stated, it's quite hard to find a good explanation which is understandable for a beginner.

Reply 3

OnAndOff

Original post by OnAndOff

Could you say how they are used too? Including IP Networks and MAC Addresses like you stated, it's quite hard to find a good explanation which is understandable for a beginner.

IP Address*

Reply 4

username5383500

Original post by OnAndOff

Could you say how they are used too? Including IP Networks and MAC Addresses like you stated, it's quite hard to find a good explanation which is understandable for a beginner.

I'm happy to give you an explanation, but I don't want to just hand you free answers. Tell me what you know about IP addressing so far, and what you think they're used for and I'll fill in the gaps. Keeping in mind that my original analogy of "IP addresses are like door numbers" sort of covers it.

Reply 5

OnAndOff

Original post by AcseI

So my teacher isn't so great I wasn't really taught much of IT and was just given course work so I'm really confused.. I've learnt about the Motherboard, CPU, RAM which is volatile and ROM which isn't, Northbridge, Southbridge, GPU etc. I don't think it's useful for Computer Networking, so yeah I really need help.

Reply 6

OnAndOff

Original post by AcseI

I have a week to do this, btw.

Reply 7

username5383500

Original post by OnAndOff

Okay, that's fair. I'll start you off, you can do some research and we can go from there.

It's effectively as I said. IP addresses are a bit like door numbers. They're a way for computers to tell each other apart on a network. And just like how you might write the address on a letter and the postman needs to know the door number, network traffic uses IP addresses (among other things) to get to the right destination.

In IPv4, addresses are made up of 4 numbers from 0 to 255, separated by a period. So for example, you might see the address 192.168.10.1. You can Google "what is my IP address" and it'll tell you your public facing IP. You can also see the local address of your computer by opening a command prompt and using the ipconfig command (on Windows). If you do both of these, you'll see that your public IP address is different to the address of your computer. This is because some IP address ranges are for private use, whereas others are for public use.

Now I don't know how much depth you need to go into, but that covers the very basics. Of course I'm still not sure what it is that you actually need to do here. That's as much free info as I'll provide though, and it's up to you to do some research now. If you come back with specific questions, or want to clarify whether you understand something then I can help further. But the expectation now is that you find out some stuff for yourself.