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An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. [1] [2] IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing.
In the original design of IPv4, an IP address was divided into two parts: the network identifier was the most significant octet of the address, and the host identifier was the rest of the address. The latter was also called the rest field. This structure permitted a maximum of 256 network identifiers, which was quickly found to be inadequate.
Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated. [35]
Packets that hold Internet Protocol data carry a 4-bit IP version number as the first field of its header. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Currently, only IPv4 and IPv6 packets are seen on the Internet , having IP version numbers 4 and 6, respectively.
The original list of IPv4 address blocks was published in September 1981. [3] In previous versions of the document, [19] [20] network numbers were 8-bit numbers rather than the 32-bit numbers used in IPv4. At that time, three networks were added that were not listed earlier: 42.rrr.rrr.rrr, 43.rrr.rrr.rrr, and 44.rrr.rrr.rrr.
The concept of subnetting the IPv4 address space 200.100.10.0/24, which contains 256 addresses, into two smaller address spaces, namely 200.100.10.0/25 and 200.100.10.128/25 with 128 addresses each. Computers participating in an IP network have at least one network address.
A reverse DNS lookup is a query of the DNS for domain names when the IP address is known. Multiple domain names may be associated with an IP address. The DNS stores IP addresses in the form of domain names as specially formatted names in pointer (PTR) records within the infrastructure top-level domain arpa. For IPv4, the domain is in-addr.arpa.
The header contains information about IP version, source IP address, destination IP address, time-to-live, etc. The payload of an IP packet is typically a datagram or segment of the higher-level transport layer protocol, but may be data for an internet layer (e.g., ICMP or ICMPv6) or link layer (e.g., OSPF) instead.