Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [242]
TCP/IP was originally developed for use on the Advanced Research Projects Agency network, ARPAnet, which was funded to support military and computer-science research. Therefore, you may hear TCP/IP being referred to as the "DARPA Internet Protocols." Since that first Internet, many other TCP/IP networks have come into use, such as the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, as well as thousands of other local and regional networks around the world. All these networks are interconnected into a single conglomerate known as the Internet.
On a TCP/IP network, each machine is assigned an IP address, which is a 32-bit number uniquely identifying the machine. You need to know a little about IP addresses to structure your network and assign addresses to hosts. The IP address is usually represented as a dotted quad: four numbers in decimal notation, separated by dots. As an example, the IP address 0x80114b14 (in hexadecimal format) can be written as 128.17.75.20.
Two special cases should be mentioned here: dynamic IP addresses and masqueraded IP addresses. Both were invented to overcome the current shortage of IP addresses (which will not be of concern any longer once everybody has adopted the new IPv6 standard that prescribes 6 bytes for the IP addresses—enough for every amoeba in the universe to have an IP address).[*]
Dynamic IP addresses are what most Internet service providers (ISPs) use. When you connect to your ISP's service, whether by dial-up, DSL, or otherwise, you are assigned an IP number out of a pool that the ISP has allocated for this service. The next time you log in, you might get a different IP number. The idea behind this is that only a small number of the customers of an ISP are logged in at the same time, so a smaller number of IP addresses are needed. Still, as long as your computer is connected to the Internet, it has a unique IP address that no other computer is using at that time.
Masquerading (also known as Network Address Translation, NAT ) allows several computers to share an IP address. All machines in a masqueraded network use so-called private IP numbers, numbers out of a range that is allocated for internal purposes and that can never serve as real addresses out there on the Internet. Any number of networks can use the same private IP numbers, as they are never visible outside of the LAN. One machine, the "masquerading server," will map these private IP numbers to one public IP number (either dynamic or static) and ensure through an ingenious mapping mechanism that incoming packets are routed to the right machine.
The IP address is divided into two parts: the network address and the host address. The network address consists of the higher-order bits of the address and the host address of the remaining bits. (In general, each host is a separate machine on the network.) The size of these two fields depends on the type of network in question. For example, on a Class B network (for which the first byte of the IP address is between 128 and 191), the first two bytes of the address identify the network, and the remaining two bytes identify the host (Figure 13-1). For the example address just given, the network address is 128.17, and the host address is 75.20. To put this another way, the machine with IP address 128.17.75.20 is host number 75.20 on the network 128.17.
In addition, the host portion of the IP address may be subdivided to allow for a subnetwork address. Subnetworking allows large networks to be divided into smaller subnets, each of which may be maintained independently. For example, an organization may allocate a single Class