

Choose a subnet mask based on your answers to one and two. If you need a subnet with 500 devices on it, it will require a very different subnet than one with only 30 devices.ģ. On a larger enterprise scale, different departments, office floors, resources, or locations may require their own subnets.Ģ. You may want one dedicated to a home office or one for guests. A home network may only need one if everyone on the network is trusted. Subnetting is the process of dividing a large network into smaller ones.ġ. Want more help learning subnetting? Check out these courses in our VIP Members Section IPv4 subnetting can be confusing at first, but we promise with practice it will become second nature. Than legacy classful addressing CIDR notation is expressed as /XX WILDCARD MASKĪ wildcard mask indicates which parts of an IP address are available for examination.Ĭlassless interdomain routing was developed to provide more granularity If you want to discuss IPv4, you need to learn the following terms.

You will never see public IPv4 addresses in these ranges. These IP address ranges are reserved for internal networks. These were the first effort to divide network IDs and set how many public IPv4 addresses you can have. Without understanding decimal to binary, this would be a very difficult calculation.

We now look at all available combinations of the next four binary positions. 01010000 converts to 80, our first IP in the range. Why is this? We know the first four binary characters are part of the network, so cannot change. They also gave us an IP range of 199.44.6.80. We see the first 28 binary digits are in the one position. In this example, our internet provider gave us a different subnet mask (/28). *Remember that hosts cannot have an IP address that ends in the first or last number in the available range.*Ĭlassful addressing will use the following subnet masks.īut what if we want a /28 subnet mask, for instance? In this next example, our internet provider gave us an IP range of 199.44.6.0 with a /24 subnet, allowing 254 IP addresses. So, the first 24 binary digits (or three octets) of an IP range are for the network (non-changing), and the last eight binary digits (last octet) are for the hosts. The above example is called a /24 (pronounced whack 24) subnet because there are 24 binary digits in the “1” (or network) position. *Note that subnet masks can only be written with all ones followed by all zeros.* Any binary digit that is a “1” is for the network, while a “0” is for the host. We can view this when examining the subnet mask in binary format. Subnet masks determine which part of the IP address is for the network, and which is for the host. Understanding this will assist you in setting up your networks and is required on both the CompTIA Network+ and Cisco Certified Network Associate exams. While IPv4 addresses appear to be four sets of numbers separated by decimals, they are actually made up of 32 ones and zeros.

The subnet mask determines how many IPv4 addresses can be assigned within a network. Subnetting allows a computer/host to know if the machine it wants to talk to is local or outside of its network.
