A Brief Overview of IP Addresses

Basiclly an IP Address is a name for a computer. A computer can have as many ip addresses as you want to give it, but every computer that wants to send or receive data on the internet needs to have an ip address.

An ip address is a set of four three digit numbers divided by periods. The numbers of an ip address range from 0 to 255. An ip address acts as an identification number for a computer. It lets other computers know which computer it is. Because an ip address acts as identification number, no two computers on the internet can have the same ip address.

Computers that are in an internal network, can be separated from the internet by something called NAT. Computers behind NAT do not have ip address that are directly on the internet. There are some ip addresses that are reserved for internal networks. Here are a couple common ones.

192.168.x.x 10.0.x.x Where x can represent any number from 0 to 255.

I really wanted to just describe what an ip address is and what it looks like. I hope I've done that.