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March 30, 2007
Can I Have Your IP?
Dear Larry,
What on earth is an IP address? I’ve heard this term thrown
around before but have no clue as to what it really means.
F. K.
Dear R. K.,
It’s actually not a difficult concept so in that regard it is
useful to understand what an IP address is and why it’s important.
An IP (or Internet Protocol) address is just a fancy term for
a computer’s “telephone number.” In the same way that a telephone number
uniquely identifies one of your telephone lines or cell phones, an IP address
uniquely identifies a computer or a web site. Just like every house has its own
street address, every computer and web site on the Internet has its own IP
address. Other devices such as printers, BlackBerrys, and even TiVos might have
one.
Under the current standard, an IP address is displayed as 4
sets of numbers separated by periods, where each number falls between 0 and 255.
So for example, the IP address for my web site is
66.232.153.109 and the town of Greenwich
site is 167.206.79.217. Want to visit the
Greenwich web site? Open your Internet browser and type
167.206.79.217 in the address box and press
Enter. Or visit the Greenwich Schools site by entering
70.168.75.6. Or try Googling something at
64.233.161.99.
A little difficult to remember all those numbers, you say?
Sure it is…it’s much easier to remember
www.google.com than 64 dot 233 dot whatever. That’s where a domain name
server or DNS comes into play. Domain name servers are the directory assistance
computers of the Internet, transparent to most of us, but vital to the
Internet’s operation. When you instruct your browser to visit
www.greenwichlibrary.org, the
first thing that happens is that this text is passed to a domain name server.
Its job is to translate what you typed into the correct IP address—in this case,
167.206.79.224—so that other computers will
know what you’re talking about!
In a movie or TV show, you might hear someone say, “Call John
at 203-555-4792.” The 555 exchange is reserved for fake telephone numbers and
some special numbers (like long distance information). Similarly, when an IP
address is mentioned in a movie or TV show, it’s usually a bogus address. For
instance, on the Fox TV show 24, you might hear Chloe shout, “I’m opening a
socket on IP address 262 dot 148 dot 17 dot 5.” This is a fictitious IP address
because the first number, 262, falls outside the range of 0 to 255.
You mathematicians out there may have already calculated that
under the current scheme, we’re limited to roughly 4.3 billion IP addresses.
Believe it or not, that’s not nearly enough at the rate our electronic world is
growing. As a result, the new IP address system (not yet widely in use but
already recognized by Windows Vista) relies on 16 sets of numbers instead of
only 4. That should keep us and our gadgets happy well into the future.
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
