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IP Addresses: A Sneak Preview
Until now, we have always referred to Internet-connected systems
(or, to use the more formal term, hosts) by name.
Most Internet users have a strong intuitive feel for the
hierarchical domain-based naming system used in the Internet, and
are very comfortable with the use of names like
amazon.com and
ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au.
We have not yet mentioned the fact that actual packet
delivery in the Internet (what we called, in lecture 2, the network delivery service)
is based on a separate, fixed-length numeric IP
Address. IP addresses are used by the Internet's delivery
service, the Internet Protocol, or IP, to route
packets of data through the Internet to their destination.
We return to IP addresses in much greater detail later. However,
for the moment we simply need to know that every system has a
unique 4-byte address usually written in the form
a.b.c.d, where each of the letters represents
the decimal value of the appropriate byte in the address. For
example, the IP address of ironbark is
149.144.21.60.
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