On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:36:05PM -0700, Kendall Shaw wrote:
| In the networking section of the OpenBSD FAQ it suggests reading
| "Understanding IP addressing":
| 
| http://www.3com.com/other/pdfs/infra/corpinfo/en_US/501302.pdf
| 
| I'm having a hard time understanding it. In many places they use 2
| numbers, e.g. 2(21) or 232 (4,294,967,296). Can you understand what they
| are saying?
| 
| For example, on page 3:
| 
| "IPv4 defines a 32-bit address which means that there are
| only 232 (4,294,967,296) IPv4 addresses available."
| 
| 232 what?

That is '2^32', the 32 are probably superscripted. It means two to the
power of thirty-two which turns out to be a bit more than 4 billion.

| On page 11:
| 
| "The first step in the planning process is to take the maximum number of
| subnets required and round up to the nearest power of two. For example,
| if an organization needs nine subnets, 23 (or 8) will not provide
| enough subnet addressing space, so the network administrator will
| need to round up to 24 (or 16)."
| 
| 23 or 8 what? Bits? What are 23 and 8 alternatives of? 24 or 16 looks
| like alternative prefix lengths for class A or B networks, but I don't
| get 23 or 8.

Again, 2^3 and 2^4 which work out to 8 and 16 respectively. Again, the
exponents are probably superscripted.

Cheers,

Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd

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