subnet mask

Subnet Mask

Today our topic is about subnet mask, This topic is important and interesting, most of the people confused in subnet mass, Because their concepts is not clear and always in doubt,  How much you know about subnet mask i don't know, But i ensure you after complete reading of this post your concept and all doubt will be clear forever in easy way. In previous post we have discussed in details about IP concepts, In subnet mask that concept will be use so i will suggest you to refer first IP concepts post after that you can well understand subnet mask. So lets start this topic.

What is Subnet mask ?

Subnet mask introduce from subnetting, Hence to understand subnet mask we have to understand subnetting.Now we will see what is subnetting ? why subnetting is required, If you can recall our IP post reference we have already discussed there are two version of IP one is IPv4 and other is IPv6. We generally use IPv4 and our discussion is also about IPv4 in this version we have limited IP. Now you can think all over the world people required unique IP to connect through internet, But we have limited IP so it is major problem in front of the technology, How to overcome of this problem introduce concept and reason of subnetting. So we can say to overcome the problem of limited IP, We required subnetting.

subnet mask explained

Subnetting is a technique to use IP addresses efficiently or preserved IP addresses with minimum wastage of IP addresses. To do this we have only three methods.

1 Use private IP, We know private IP for class A 10.0.0.0 for class B 172.16.x.x and for class C 192.0.0.0 

2 Use IPv6 where unlimited IP are available no shortage for whole globe 128 bits, remember in IPv4 only 32 bits available.

3 Use Subnetting.

Hence here we will use subnetting concept to find subnet mask, The meaning of subnetting is "network within a network" or logically division of IP addresses,To understand why subnetting is required take an example to well explain the concept of subnetting see below picture.

How to find subnet mask ?

                                                

Subnet Mask