I’ll like to take some time off this Sunday evening and share some knowledge l’ve gathered in Networking with the rest of you wonderful and awesome people all over the world. The topic that comes to my head is IPv4 addressing. IP version 4 address is a 32 bit long addressing scheme used to universally identify devices on the internet. The address space in this addressing scheme is 2 raised to the power 32 which is 4,294,967,296. That’s a long number right, l know, don’t worry about it, just remember 2 ^32. It will make you live longer lol. So in this addressing, you can either represent the numbers in binary or use dotted decimal notations. In the binary representation, you simply write the binary representation of the numbers, but in the dotted decimal notation, which is more fun to look at and comprehend than bunch of binary freaking zeros and ones, you divide the 32 bits into four blocks and each binary number in that block is converted into decimal, then put dot in between them. Just a distraction, do you know why humans are comfortable using decimals than binary, it’s because we have 10 fingers. What about computers, why do they love binary? because those freaks have only two fingers. But how come they are faster than us? Simply because it’s easy to use 2 fingers than 10 fingers lol. Ok, back to business. So if you have an address like 128.11.3.31, this is a dotted decimal notation version of this address 10000000 00001011 00000011 00011111. Isn’t that gross? lol. Who can remember this? not me. I’d better be sleeping. So that’s the general idea, you can easily convert from one form to another by simply doing the binary work and remember each block represents 8 bits and if after converting a number from decimal to binary, it didn’t give you 8 bits, please don’t cry, just add zeros on the left side(most significant side) to reach 8 bits .
Just a take home note, when writing an address in the dotted decimal form, please don’t add any zeroes before a number, you can not mix binary form with dotted decimal form in the same address, don’t put dots in-between the zeros and ones in the binary form, each number in the dotted decimal form must be less or equal to 255 and finally, there can be only four blocks separated by dots in the dotted decimal format.
