Question

what is an ip address and how we will find our own ip address?

Answer 1

Its like your computers regenerated address. If you want to know your own personal ip address you can easily find it by going to myipaddress.com

Answer 2

An IP ( Internet Protocol ) address is an address that uniquely identifies your computer on a network or internet. It may not remain the same if your Router or ISP has a pool of addresses that it reuses when computers connect and disconnect from the net.

Answer 3

An IP address is a numerical address used by other computers and devices on a network to contact your computer. Two devices on the same network cannot have the same IP address.

There are two main kinds of IP address in use. The most commonly used is called IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) and is often called a dotted quad as it is 4 numbers between 0 and 255 separated by dots (aka full stops or periods). An example of this kind of address would be 192.168.0.10, 0.0.0.0 and 255.255.255.255 are not used for devices as they have a special meaning. The other is called IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) and is much longer. IPv6 came about due to the increasing number of devices leading to a predicted shortage of IPv4 addresses. You're unlikley to ever come across an IPv6 address in the forseeable future so i won't discuss them here.

Data on networks (including the internet) is divided up into chunks called packets. At the start of each packet there is some information abvout what sort of packet it is, how big it is, the IP address of the device it's going to and the IP address of the device it's from. You can think of the packet as an envelope in the post that has the recipients address and a return address on it.

Depending on the device you have there are various ways to find out your IP address. For non-PC devices you might be able to find it in the device settings or device information section of the settings. On a Windows PC the easiest way is to open a Dos window and use the command 'ipconfig'. For each connected network port it will give you the IP address.

Every device on the internet has an IP address. When you enter a site name into your browser your device uses a service called DNS to find out which IP address is associated with that name and then uses that address to communicate with the other device.

There are two ways an IP address gets assigned to a device, static and dynamic. Most devices you come across will use dynamic, typically only things like web servers, email servers, firewalls and routers (devices that manage the flow of packets and route them to their destination over the quickest path the can find and if that path is blocked or over loaded find a different path) will have static IP addresses. Static addresses don't change so they are assigned by typing them settings of the device. You should only set the address of you device this way if you know what you're doing, are told to do so by someone who knows what they're doing or are on your own network which is not connected to the internet. If you do the latter then use an address that starts with a 10 (e.g. 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2 and so on) as the whole 10 range has been reserved for private networks. Dynamic addresses can change and are set by having your device setup to use them (usually a setting in the settigns of the device). when the device first connects to the network it sends out a special kind of packet which is picked up by a server called a DHCP server. The DHCP server then assigns that device an IP address and sends it back to the device using the physical address of that device (this physical address is built into the hardware of the network port and usually cannot be changed so isn't suitable for normal use). There are a few advantages to this: It's easy for an end user to configure their device, indeed typically a device will come ready configured for this; If there are more devices that could be connected to the network than there are available addresses the same address can be used for different devices at different times, if one that used to have that address connects whilst it's being used by a different device it is assigned a new IP address; If a device is used on different networks (e.g. you use your laptop on your home network, the network at school/work and the free Wi-Fi in Starbucks) each network will jusrt assign it an address that will work on that network and it will work without the user having to go in and change settings.