TL;DR

Ever wondered how with just an IP address your data travels across the world with n number of networks and hosts in between to get confused with?

Computer network works on IP address but we seldom see ourselves typing the IP address in our browser because for us it is comparatively harder to remember numbers than names.

DNS Overhead

So, when we type www.google.comin our browser, our ISP (internet service provider) provides us with a service called DNS (domain name service) which helps in converting a domain name to an IP address.

This is called DNS overhead because we wanted to reach Google and not the DNS but we had to in order to get the IP address.

This happens for the first time and then the browser caches the IP address for some time until expired.

Octets and Classes

Each IP address has a size of 32 bits and comes with a network ID and a host ID to which it has to travel.

For better readability, it is represented divided into 4 octets of 8 bits each and converted to decimal number.

Octets

Below is how we represent an IP address, here we took an example of IP address: 10.1.2.3.

The IP address is divided into different classes based on the placing of 1 and 0.

#computer-science #computer-networking #networking #devops #ip-address