Networkingexplain

an IP address is a numeric address it's an identifier for a computer or device on a network every device has to have an IP address for communication purposes the IP address consists of two parts the first part is the network address and the second part is the host address there are also two types of IP addresses the first one is the most common one it's called IP version 4 and a second type is IP version 6 IP version 4 is the current version of IP addresses it's a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods each group of numbers that are separated by periods is called an octet the number range in each octet is 0 to 255 this address version can produce over 4 billion unique addresses in the world of computers and networks this IP address and this format here is meaningless computers and networks don't read IP addresses in this standard numeric format and that's because they only understand numbers in a binary format a binary format is a number...

AARP stands for address resolution protocol now this is a protocol that is used to resolve IP addresses to MAC addresses the MAC address is a physical address of a device it's a globally unique number that is assigned to every network interface card whenever a device needs to communicate with another device on a local area network it needs the MAC address for that device and devices use ARP to acquire the MAC address for that device so as an example let's say that computer a wants to communicate with computer B now computer a already knows the IP address for computer B but in order to communicate with computer B it still needs its MAC address now an IP address is used to locate a device on a network and the MAC address is what identifies the actual device so in order to find the MAC address computer a will first look at its internal list called an ARP cache to see if computer B's IP address already has a matching MAC address in fact we can check this ourselves at a Windows ...