Session 2: IP addressing

So far you have seen the components of a home network, and seen how all devices on the network have IP addresses. In this session you are going to delve further into the home gateway and into the nature of IP addresses. You will see that all IP addresses have two parts. One part identifies the network and the other part identifies the device itself. As a result of this division, there are rules covering network addresses.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• understand that an IP address has a network part (common to all devices on the network) and a unique part for device (or host)
• recognise that a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 indicates that the final number of an IP address represents the device
• diagnose local network problems caused by incorrect IP addresses and non-allocation of IP addresses.