node ip addressing

[carl_townshend]

Hi all this may seem a silly question, but how come we can only ip address nodes up to 255, and not any higher ?

[keeleym]

Hi Carl

An IP address is a 32 bit value shown in dotted decimal notation i.e xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.

Each octet contains 8 bits and the total value of each octet with all the bits turned on (set to 1's) is 255.

So due to this constraint it is not possible to have a host with an IP address over 255.

HTH

Best Regards,

Michael