Quote:
Originally Posted by Zorgman
We're running out of IP's right? But why can't they use letters in an IP?
20A.196.4G.4P
etc.
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Each "dot" is 8 bits, so it can only have the value 0-255. (Or as a 32 bit integer, 0-4,294,967,296)
x.x.x.x is just the way it's expressed to humans in decimal form; you cannot fit any more data in since natively it's a fixed size integer.
It gets more complicated because the legacy class A, B, C, D system reserves huge chunks of address space back when no one ever expected that we'd have millions of hosts on the internet.
IPv6 just adds more bits on, and expressing it in hex makes it a bit shorter and easier to understand. You could display it as x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x if you really wanted to
One positive thing with the IPv4 situation is that allocations can be recycled - legacy allocations from days gone by, like a medium size company with a huge A class allocation of 16,777,216 IPs, can renumber into a smaller allocation and release those IPs back into the pool. Unused allocations can also be reclaimed. It's still a big headache.