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Your External IP

A Comprehensive Look at
Subnetting, Gateways, and IP Ranges
Before reading this guide make sure that you understand Binary
Numbers! For the simplicity of this guide lets assume that every
device that connects to a network has an ip address. That means
that every printer, fax machine, scanner, copier, computer, router,
and server that is on your network has an ip address. The internet
works exactly the same way except on a much larger scale. Every
device on the internet has an ip address.
The Form of an IP address
Every IP address is a series of four numbers separated by periods.
Generally it looks something like 208.155.103.158. Each number
will range from 0 to 255. Each number is an eight bit number, and
Home in binary looks like the following.
List of all Routers
List of all Programs 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
Firewalling
Software 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 = 255
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Since ip addresses are made up of 8 bit numbers, the largest
Software
number you will see in an ip address is 255. The smallest number
Static IP Software
you could see in an ip would be a 0. So if you think of an ip address
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as a series of four eight bit numbers separated by periods, you get
Double Router Detector
the following.
Screenshot Grabber
Routers 10010011.10110101.10110111.01010110 = 147.181.183.86
Port Forwarding Guides
Screenshot Database Simple Subnet Masks
Router Passwords IP addresses are grouped by something called subnet mask. Every
Request New Router ip address has a corresponding subnet mask. The subnet mask
Double Router specifies the range of the ip addresses in a group. The subnet mask
Forwarding looks a lot like an ip address. It is made up of four eight bit
How to Open a Port numbers separated by periods. These numbers once again range
Ports from 0 to 255. A typical subnet mask is 255.255.255.0.
List of all Ports
There are a couple intresting things about subnet masks. They don't
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really behave like you would initially expect them to. The numbers
Games
of a subnet mask count ip addresses that are not there. This means
How to Port Forward
higher the numbers of a subnet mask are the less ip addresses
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belong to it.
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For example:
How to Port Forward
Two Xboxes
= There are no ip addresses in this
Setup a Static IP 255.255.255.255
Address range.
Game Walkthroughs = This is the range of all ip
Guides 0.0.0.0
addresses.
How To Setup Android
Devices Lets take one of the most basic subnets the 255.255.255.0 one, and
How To Setup Your see how many addresses are in it's range. The first step is to put
Router the subnet into binary. Let go ahead and do that now. If you don't
 Setup a Static IP know how to put something into binary read Binary Numbers for
Address more information.
General Networking
Port Forwarding 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 = 255.255.255.0
Double Router So how do we find out how many ip addresses are in this group?
Forwarding Well its rather simple actually. Just count the number of zeros, and
Port Forward Minecraft then take 2 to the number of zeros power. In this case it would be
Utorrent Help 2^8 = 256. Another way to do it is to multiply 2 times itself 7
Windows 8 Overview times. 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2=256 So we have two hundred and fifty
Support six ip addresses in that range! Another thing that is intresting to
How To Add A New know. Subnets will always be all ones on one side, and all zeros on
Router the other. I mean that they will always look like 111111000000 and
PFConfig Support never like 1010101101.
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Privacy Policy Lets take a closer look at what a group of ip addresses looks like.
Using the 255.255.255.0 subnet from above let me make a table.
192.168.1.0 - Subnet Address
192.168.1.1 - usually the gateway
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.1.4
192.168.1.5
192.168.1.6
...
192.168.1.252
192.168.1.253
192.168.1.254
192.168.1.255 - Broadcast Address
Every group of ip addresses, has a Subnet Address, Broadcast
Address, and Gateway. Both the Subnet Address ip address and the
Broadcast Address ip address are used to send information to every
ip address in the group. The Gateway acts sort of like the group's
controller. For instance, let's say that your computer is on the ip
address 192.168.1.3. When you send send information to the
internet, your computer sends data to the gateway. Then the
gateway sends that data on to the internet. The same thing is true
when you get data from the internet. The internet sends data to the
gateway, and then the gateway passes that information on to your
computer. The gateway can be on any ip address in the range.
Usually it is on the second ip address in the range, or the second ip
address from the end of the range. The Subnet Address is always on
the first ip address in the range, and the Broadcast Address is
always on the last one in the range.
Okay I'm going to change our subnet from 255.255.255.0 to
255.255.255.240. Lets say the ip address of our computer is
192.168.1.132. How many ip addresses do we have? Well lets
convert the subnet to binary. You should get the following binary
subnet.
11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000
Okay, we have four zeros. So take 2^4 which equals 16.
Alternatively 2*2*2*2 equals 16 as well. We have 16 ip addresses in
our range. Well lets draw out our table. We can't draw our ip
address table without knowing where the range starts. This is how
you figure that out. We take our subnet and AND it to our ip address
converted into binary. Go ahead and conver our ip address into
binary. You should get the following.
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132
Now we AND that with our subnet. It is easy to think of ANDing as
finding the truth of two numbers. Every 1 is true and every 0 is
false.
True and true is true! 1 and 1 is 1.
True and false is false. 1 and 0 is 0.
False and true is false. 0 and 1 is 0.
False and false is false. 0 and 0 is 0.
So lets line up our subnet and our ip address.
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132
11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000 = 255.255.255.240
-----------------------------------
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000
So look at the first column. We have a 1 and a 1. 1(true) and
1(true) = 1(true) The next column is the same thing. The thrid
column is a 0 and a 1. 0(false) and 1(true) = 0(false). Continue
doing that for the whole number. Now that we have our result lets
take it and convert it back to base 10, so we can get the first ip
address in our range.
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000 = 192.168.1.128
Great! Now that we have our first ip address and we know that we
have 16 ip addresses, we can make our table.
192.168.1.128 - Subnet Address
192.168.1.129 - Gateway
192.168.1.130 -
192.168.1.131 -
192.168.1.132 - Our computer!
192.168.1.133 -
192.168.1.134 -
192.168.1.135 -
192.168.1.136 -
192.168.1.137 -
192.168.1.138 -
192.168.1.139 -
192.168.1.140 -
192.168.1.141 -
192.168.1.142 -
192.168.1.143 - Broadcast Address
Well that gives you a pretty good idea of how computers figure out
subnetting. You should have a good idea what you network should
look like now, and what subnetting is. Let me know if you found this
useful by using our Comments page!

Jason Bauer
Jason Bauer is an owner and programmer
for PortForward. You can find more of his
articles in the Games and Applications
section of our site.