IPv4 and IPv6 - CompTIA A+ 220-1201 - 2.6

If you've ever communicated across a network, then you've probably used IP version 4. IPv4 is one of the most popular protocols in the world, and you need to know how to configure a system with IPv4 configuration parameters as part of the A+ exam objectives. Not only do we need to understand IP version 4,

we need to understand the most recent version of IP, which is IP version 6. There are some similarities in operation between these two different IP versions, but there are significant differences on how they look and how you configure them on a system. IP version 4 is a 32bit address. There are 32 ones and zeros

that work together to create that IP version 4 address. From a human perspective, it's easier to represent this in a decimal form and we represent it as four separate decimal numbers. For example, on this address, we have 192.168.131. And all of those together make up the IPv4 address. If you wanted to represent this in binary, you could

write out all the ones and zeros associated with each of those numbers. Each of those four numbers is referred to as an octet because it is made up of eight different ones or zeros. Sometimes we refer to this as a bite or eight individual bits. When you combine all of them together, you have 32 bits, which

is also equal to four total bytes. Another interesting thing to keep in mind is that these eight bits together can consist of a number between 0ero and 255. So none of these octets will ever exceed the value of 255. For us to communicate across the public internet, every device needs to have a unique IP address. For example,

one device could have an IP address of 1.1.1.1, and that device can communicate to a device that has an IP address of 2.2.2.2. As you can probably tell, there's a finite number of IPv4 addresses that you can create based on the combinations of numbers that might be available. And if you do the math,