Topic summary
IP addresses
Extracted from the Wikipedia article IP address.
IP addresses are usually displayed in a human-readable notation, but systems may use them in various different computer number formats. CIDR notation can also be used to designate how much of the address should be treated as a routing prefix. For example, 192.0.2.1/24 indicates that 24 significant bits of the address are the prefix, with the remaining 8 bits used for host addressing. This is equivalent to the historically used subnet mask (in this case, 255.255.255.0).