Appendix C: IP Address, Subnet and Gateway
Appendix C: IP Address, Subnet and Gateway
This section discusses Communities, Gateways, IP Addresses and Subnet masking
Communities
A community is a string of printable ASCII characters that identifies a user group with the same access privileges. For example, a common community name is “public”. For security purposes, the SNMP agent validates requests before responding. The agent can be configured so that only trap managers that are members of a community can send requests and receive responses from a particular community. This prevents unauthorized managers from viewing or changing the configuration of a device.
Gateways
Gateway, also referred to as a router, is any computer with two or more network adapters connecting to different physical networks. Gateways allow for transmission of IP packets among networks on an Internet.
IP Addresses
Every device on an Internet must be assigned a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. An IP address is a
IP addresses appear in dotted decimal (rather than in binary) notation. Dotted decimal notation divides the
To accommodate networks of different sizes, the IP address has three divisions – Classes A for large, B for medium and C for small. The difference among the network classes is the number of octets reserved for the network ID and the number of octets reserved for the host ID.
Class | Value of First Octet | Network ID |
A | First octet | |
B | First two octets | |
C | First tree octets |
Host ID Last three octets Last two octets Last octet
Number of Hosts
16,387,064
64,516
254
Any value between 0 and 255 is valid as a host ID octet except for those values the InterNIC reserves for other purposes
Value | Purpose |
0, 255 | Subnet masking |
127Loopback testing and interprocess communication on local devices
WebCAM - user manual |