TP-Link TL-SG3424 User Manual page 16

Class D and E:
Class D is a class with first 4 MSB (Most significance bit) set to 1-1-1-0 and
is used for IP Multicast. See also RFC 1112. Class E is a class with first 4 MSB set
to 1-1-1-1 and is used for IP broadcast.
According to IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), there are three
specific IP address blocks reserved and able to be used for extending internal
network. We call it Private IP address and list below:
Class A 10.0.0.0 --- 10.255.255.255
Class B 172.16.0.0 --- 172.31.255.255
Class C 192.168.0.0 --- 192.168.255.255
Please refer to RFC 1597 and RFC 1466 for more information.
Subnet mask:
It means the sub-division of a class-based network or a CIDR block. The
subnet is used to determine how to split an IP address to the network prefix and the
host address in bitwise basis. It is designed to utilize IP address more efficiently and
ease to manage IP network.
For a class B network, 128.1.2.3, it may have a subnet mask 255.255.0.0 in
default, in which the first two bytes is with all 1s. This means more than 60
thousands of nodes in flat IP address will be at the same network. It's too large to
manage practically. Now if we divide it into smaller network by extending network
prefix from 16 bits to, say 24 bits, that's using its third byte to subnet this class B
network. Now it has a subnet mask 255.255.255.0, in which each bit of the first
three bytes is 1. It's now clear that the first two bytes is used to identify the class B
network, the third byte is used to identify the subnet within this class B network and,
of course, the last byte is the host number.
Not all IP address is available in the sub-netted network. Two special
addresses are reserved. They are the addresses with all zero's and all one's host
number. For example, an IP address 128.1.2.128, what IP address reserved will be
looked like? All 0s mean the network itself, and all 1s mean IP broadcast.
128.1.2.128/25
Network
10000000.00000001.00000010.1 0000000
25 bits
All 0s = 128.1.2.128
All 1s= 128.1.2.255
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User Manual
Subnet
1 0000000
1 1111111
Publication date: January, 2006
Revision A2
User Manual
In this diagram, you can see the subnet mask with 25-bit long,
255.255.255.128, contains 126 members in the sub-netted network. Another is that
the length of network prefix equals the number of the bit with 1s in that subnet mask.
With this, you can easily count the number of IP addresses matched. The following
table shows the result.
Prefix Length No. of IP matched No. of Addressable IP
/32
/31
/30
/29
/28
/27
/26
/25
/24
/23
/22
/21
/20
/19
/18
/17
/16
Table 2-4
According to the scheme above, a subnet mask 255.255.255.0 will partition a
network with the class C. It means there will have a maximum of 254 effective
nodes existed in this sub-netted network and is considered a physical network in an
autonomous network. So it owns a network IP address which may looks like
168.1.2.0.
With the subnet mask, a bigger network can be cut into small pieces of
network. If we want to have more than two independent networks in a worknet, a
partition to the network must be performed. In this case, subnet mask must be
applied.
Publication date: January, 2006
Revision A2
24
1 -
2 -
4 2
8 6
16 14
32 30
64 62
128 126
256 254
512 510
1024 1022
2048 2046
4096 4094
8192 8190
16384 16382
32768 32766
65536 65534