Net Nerd Needed: Quick Question
 

In my ever evolving pursuit for personal perfection, I have come accross a question which perplexes me... IP addresses.

I know they are made up of 4 octets, example:

111.222.23.123

Okay, now I want to know what each Octet means.

I have about 10 sites hosted on one host - each with its own virtual server with different IP addresses.

The first octet never changes - 64. What is this? The country it is in is my first guess?

The second octet changes over my 10 sites but not much. The last two octets seem random.

Can somebody please explain how the servers are assigned their IP addresses and what each Octet means?

Nerdy question I know, but it's been bugging me, I can't find the answer, but I guess it's real easy. :glugglug

some of the A classes are owned by certain entities - for instance 19.x.x.x is ford motor company.

otherwise there isn't really any placement scheme for the IP addresses. you'll notice a lot of 24.x.x.x as cables as well as 68.x.x.x, but it's just because those companies carry a lease on the netblock.

Every computer in the world which is connected directly to the net (without proxy/nat servers) will have its own unique IP address.

An IP address is like a finger print in a sense, only one computer in the world could be using the IP at the same time on the internet.

The numbers mean nothing more than a way to ID the computer. Some blocks of IPs, such as 210.210. might be delegated to China for their IP space, 210.211. might be deleted to japan for their name space but there is no Definitive way to tell which country the IP belongs to, although some geotargettingn scripts come close.

Actually, every region gets assigned IP space which they further delegate to the ISPs in the country.

So, when my sites all have the same first octet and many have similar second octets, what does that mean?

They are on the same server?

It means absolutely nothing!

oct1.oct2.oct3.oct4

if any of oct1 or oct2 is different i would say you're on a different network. if oct3 is different you could ne on a different network or the netowrk your on has multiple Class C's (255 IP addresses).

You can have a single machine running with 2,10,1000 ips on it if you wanted to but you could not have any other machine using any of those ips.

If you're looking to find out the geographic location of the server i would suggest using neotrace as it spits out a cute lil map of the world and draws lines (like playing connect the dots) from where you are to where your server is and how your data gets there.

http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/neoworx/default.asp

yea that is true in some cases, but the block segregation isn't dictated by a full class. you can't say that all x.y.y.y is iceland and all y.z.z.z is cuba.

I never said you could! If things worked that way any clown could build a geotargetting database instead of paying akami 10k+ for access to their DB ;)

HAHAHAHAH true that

Ok thanks guys! :thumbsup

I ask because of google. I know if sites with sequential IP addresses link to each other, they are penalized or possibly spam filtered if there are many of them in the same topic.

So, I'm guessing google is okay if I link my sites up to each other (naturally - not in a way to spam) then I won't get penalized... :thumbsup Thank you, expecially you notjoe, you seem to know your shit!