LevelOne GSW-2496 user manual Prefix Length No. of IP matched No. of Addressable IP

In this diagram, you can see the subnet mask with 25-bit long, 255.255.255.128, contains 126 members in the sub-netted network. Another is that the length of network prefix equals the number of the bit with 1s in that subnet mask. With this, you can easily count the number of IP addresses matched. The following table shows the result.

Prefix LengthNo. of IP matchedNo. of Addressable IP

/32	1	-
/31	2	-
/30	4	2
/29	8	6
/28	16	14
/27	32	30
/26	64	62
/25	128	126
/24	256	254
/23	512	510
/22	1024	1022
/21	2048	2046
/20	4096	4094
/19	8192	8190
/18	16384	16382
/17	32768	32766
/16	65536	65534
	Table 2-4

According to the scheme above, a subnet mask 255.255.255.0 will partition a network with the class C. It means there will have a maximum of 254 effective nodes existed in this sub-netted network and is considered a physical network in an autonomous network. So it owns a network IP address which may looks like 168.1.2.0.

With the subnet mask, a bigger network can be cut into small pieces of network. If we want to have more than two independent networks in a worknet, a partition to the network must be performed. In this case, subnet mask must be applied.

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