Networking

In today’s market, you must build a strong network foundation, connect your hybrid infrastructure, and deliver fast and secure applications. But you have to know your business, account strategy, and goals to design your network with current and future requirements.

What is Networking?

Networking refers to the process of connecting devices to share resources, exchange data, and communicate with each other.

As we know every device has unique identification to communicate with another it’s called an IP address.

What is IP addresses?

IP stands for Internet Protocol. An IP address is a unique identifier assigned to each device on a network.

Basically two types of IP address we can see, one is IPV4 and another one is IPV6 address.

1. IPV4 Address:

IPv4 addresses are a 32-bit number and are represented by dotted decimal notation that consists of four numbers from 0 to 255. The numbers are separated by a period, and the bit between the period is called an octate.

IPv4 starts with 0.0.0.0 and ends with 255.255.255.255, providing a little over 4.2 billion IP addresses.

CIDR Notation:

CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) notation is a way of representing IP addresses and their associated network masks.
CIDR notation consists of an IP address followed by a slash (/) and a number (e.g., 192.168.1.0/24).
The number after the slash represents the number of bits in the network mask.

Network Masks:

A network mask (or subnet mask) determines which part of an IP address represents the network and which part represents the host.
A network mask is typically written in dotted decimal notation (e.g., 255.255.255.0).
The network mask is used to determine the scope of the network (e.g., which devices are on the same network).

Subnetting:

Subnetting is the process of dividing a larger network into smaller sub-networks.
Subnetting is done by applying a network mask to an IP address.
The network mask determines which part of the IP address represents the subnet.

Key Concepts:

Network ID: The part of the IP address that represents the network.
Host ID: The part of the IP address that represents the host (device).
Broadcast Address: The highest address in a subnet (e.g., 192.168.1.255 for a /24 subnet).
Subnet Size: The number of hosts that can be addressed in a subnet (e.g., 256 for a /24 subnet).

And we have 5 types of IP address Classes:

1. Class A: 0.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.255 (127/8)
   Default subnet mask: 255.0.0.0
   Number of possible networks: 128
   Number of possible hosts per network: 16,777,216
2. Class B: 128.0.0.0 to 191.255.255.255 (191/8)
   Default subnet mask: 255.255.0.0
   Number of possible networks: 16,384
   Number of possible hosts per network: 65,536
3. Class C: 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255 (223/8)
   Default subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
   Number of possible networks: 2,097,152
   Number of possible hosts per network: 256
4. Class D: 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 (239/8)
   Used for multicast addressing
5. Class E: 240.0.0.0 to 254.255.255.255 (254/8)
   Reserved for future use

2. IPV6 Protocol

An IPv6 address is represented in hexadecimal rather than the dotted decimal like IPv4 addresses. Instead of 32 bits like an IPv4 IP address, an IPv6 address is 128 bits long. It is called a hextet and can be abbreviated by removing redundant zeros.

With IPv6, the networks are also represented using the start address and a prefix like IPv4. However, with IPv6, each hextet is sixteen bits, and the prefix number is actually the number of bits that represent the network part of the IPv6 address.

The main difference between the two versions: IPv4 is a 32 bit address and IPv6 is a 128 bit hexadecimal address. IPv6 provides a large address space, and it contains a simple header as compared to IPv4.

Here are a few examples of IPv6 addresses:

1. 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
2. fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
3. 3ffe:1900:4545:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
4. fd00:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001

Note that IPv6 addresses are typically written in hexadecimal notation, with eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons (:).

Here’s a breakdown of the different parts of an IPv6 address:

The first four groups (2001:0db8:85a3:0000) represent the network prefix.
The next four groups (0000:0000:8a2e:0370) represent the interface identifier.
The final group (7334) represents the port number.