IP address
An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number, a kind of telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet. This allows machines passing the information onwards on behalf of the sender to know where to send it next, and for the machine receiving the information to know that it is the intended destination.
An example IP address is 207.142.131.236. Converting to such numbers from the more human-readable form of domain addresses, such as www.wikipedia.org, is done via the Domain Name System. The process of conversion is known as resolution of the domain name.
Hello! gaeggce interesting gaeggce site! I'm really like it! Very, very gaeggce good!
Very nice site!
IP version 5
What would be considered as IPv5 existed only as an experimental non-IP real time streaming protocol called ST2 described in RFC 1819. This protocol was abandoned in favour of RSVP.
IP version 6
In IPv6, the new (but not yet widely deployed) standard protocol for the Internet, addresses are 128 bits wide, which, even with generous assignment of netblocks, should suffice for the foreseeable future. In theory, there would be exactly 2128, or about 3.403 × 1038 unique host interface addresses. If the earth were made entirely out of 1 cubic millimetre grains of sand, then you could give a unique address to each grain in 300 million planets the size of the earth. This large address space will be sparsely populated, which makes it possible to again encode more routing information into the addresses themselves.
A version 6 address is written as eight 4-digit (16-bit) hexadecimal numbers separated by colons. One string of zeros per address may be left out, so that 1080::800:0:417A is the same as 1080:0:0:0:0:800:0:417A.
Global unicast IPv6 addresses are constructed as two parts: a 64-bit routing part followed by a 64-bit host identifier.
Netblocks are specified as in the modern alternative for IPv4: network number, followed by a slash, and the number of relevant bits of the network number (in decimal). Example: 12AB::CD30:0:0:0:0/60 includes all addresses starting with 12AB00000000CD3.
IPv6 has many improvements over IPv4 other than just bigger address space, including autorenumbering and mandatory use of IPsec.
Further reading: Internet RFCs including RFC 791, RFC 1519 (IPv4 addresses), and RFC 2373 (IPv6 addresses).
External links
- Internet RFC database and Internet RFCs in HTML format
- IP-Lookup - Provides complete IP address lookup functionality including IPv4 and IPv6
- Find out your current IP Address, Browser Information, and more
- Displays IP address and hostname
- Show your IP address or location info of a given IP address, limited to 20 lookups / day
- Community GEO IP Address Location project, including a firefox extension to show link locations
- My IP Tool Firefox browser extension to provide IP address (Internet Explorer version in development)
