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IP address
(Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order
to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet
Protocol standard (IP)-in simpler terms, a computer address. Any participating network
device-including routers, computers, time-servers, printers, Internet fax machines, and
some telephones-can have their own unique address.
An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone
number ( compare: VoIP (voice over (the) internet protocol)) for a computer or other
network device on the Internet. Just as each street address and phone number uniquely
identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific computer
or other network device on a network. An IP address differs from other contact
information, however, because the linkage of a user's IP address to his/her name is not
publicly available information.
IP addresses can appear to be shared by multiple client devices either because they are
part of a shared hosting web server environment or because a network address translator
(NAT) or proxy server acts as an intermediary agent on behalf of its customers, in which
case the real originating IP addresses might be hidden from the server receiving a request.
A common practice is to have a NAT hide a large number of IP addresses, in the private
address space defined by RFC 1918, an address block that cannot be routed on the public
Internet. Only the "outside" interface(s) of the NAT need to have Internet-routable
addresses.
Most commonly, the NAT device maps TCP or UDP port numbers on the outside to
individual private addresses on the inside. Just as there may be site-specific extensions on
a telephone number, the port numbers are site-specific extensions to an IP address.
IP addresses are managed and created by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
(IANA). The IANA generally allocates super-blocks to Regional Internet Registries, who
in turn allocate smaller blocks to Internet service providers and enterprises.

DNS Address:

On the Internet, the Domain Name System (DNS) associates various sorts of information
with so-called domain names; most importantly, it serves as the "phone book" for the
Internet: it translates human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. en.wikipedia.org, into
the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. It also
stores other information such as the list of mail exchange servers that accept email for a
given domain. In providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, the Domain
Name System is an essential component of contemporary Internet use.

Uses :

The most basic use of DNS is to translate hostnames to IP addresses. It is in very simple
terms like a phone book. For example, if you want to know the internet address of
en.wikipedia.org, the Domain Name System can be used to tell you it is 66.230.200.100.
DNS also has other important uses.
Pre-eminently, DNS makes it possible to assign Internet destinations to the human
organization or concern they represent, independently of the physical routing hierarchy
represented by the numerical IP address. Because of this, hyperlinks and Internet contact
information can remain the same, whatever the current IP routing arrangements may be,
and can take a human-readable form (such as "wikipedia.org") which is rather easier to
remember than an IP address (such as 66.230.200.100). People take advantage of this
when they recite meaningful URLs and e-mail addresses without caring how the machine
will actually locate them.
The Domain Name System distributes the responsibility for assigning domain names and
mapping them to IP networks by allowing an authoritative server for each domain to keep
track of its own changes, avoiding the need for a central registrar to be continually
consulted and

History :

The practice of using a name as a more human-legible abstraction of a machine's

numerical address on the network predates even TCP/IP, and goes all the way to the
ARPAnet era. Back then however, a different system was used, as DNS was only
invented in 1983, shortly after TCP/IP was deployed. With the older system, each
computer on the network retrieved a file called HOSTS.TXT from a computer at SRI
(now SRI International). The HOSTS.TXT file mapped numerical addresses to names. A
hosts file still exists on most modern operating systems, either by default or through
configuration, and allows users to specify an IP address (eg. 192.0.34.166) to use for a
hostname (eg. www.example.net) without checking DNS. As of 2006, the hosts file
serves primarily for troubleshooting DNS errors or for mapping local addresses to more
organic names. Systems based on a hosts file have inherent limitations, because of the
obvious requirement that every time a given computer's address changed, every computer
that seeks to communicate with it would need an update to its hosts file.
The growth of networking called for a more scalable system: one that recorded a change
in a host's address in one place only. Other hosts would learn about the change
dynamically through a notification system, thus completing a globally accessible network
of all hosts' names and their associated IP Addresses.
At the request of Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System in
1983 and wrote the first implementation. The original specifications appear in RFC 882
and 883. In 1987, the publication of RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 updated the DNS
specification and made RFC 882 and RFC 883 obsolete. Several more-recent RFCs have
proposed various extensions to the core DNS protocols.
In 1984, four Berkeley students - Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and
Songnian Zhou - wrote the first UNIX implementation, which was maintained by Ralph
Campbell thereafter. In 1985, Kevin Dunlap of DEC significantly re-wrote the DNS
implementation and renamed it BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, previously:
Berkeley Internet Name Daemon). Mike Karels, Phil Almquist and Paul Vixie have
maintained BIND since then. BIND was ported to the Windows NT platform in the early
1990s.
Due to BIND's long history of security issues and exploits, several alternative
nameserver/resolver programs have been written and distributed in recent years.
How DNS Work In The Theory :
The domain name space consists of a tree of domain names. Each node or branch in the
tree has one or more resource records, which hold information associated with the
domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones. A zone consists of a collection of
connected nodes authoritatively served by an authoritative DNS nameserver. (Note that a
single nameserver can host several zones.)
When a system administrator wants to let another administrator control a part of the
domain name space within his or her zone of authority, he or she can delegate control to
the other administrator. This splits a part of the old zone off into a new zone, which
comes under the authority of the second administrator's nameservers. The old zone
becomes no longer authoritative for what goes under the authority of the new zone.
A resolver looks up the information associated with nodes. A resolver knows how to
communicate with name servers by sending DNS requests, and heeding DNS responses.
Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed
information.
Some resolvers function simplistically and can only communicate with a single name
server. These simple resolvers rely on a recursing name server to perform the work of
finding information for them.

IPv4:

Internet Protocol version 4 is the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol (IP) and it is the
first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. IPv4 is the dominant network layer
protocol on the Internet and apart from IPv6 it is the only protocol used on the Internet.
It is described in IETF RFC 791 (September 1981) which made obsolete RFC 760
(January 1980). The United States Department of Defense also standardized it as MIL-
STD-1777.
IPv4 is a data-oriented protocol to be used on a packet switched internetwork (e.g.,
Ethernet). It is a best effort protocol in that it does not guarantee delivery. It does not
make any guarantees on the correctness of the data; It may result in duplicated packets
and/or packets out-of-order. These aspects are addressed by an upper layer protocol (e.g.,
TCP, and partly by UDP).

The entire purpose of IP is to provide unique global computer addressing to ensure that
two computers communicating over the Internet can uniquely identify one another.

Addressing :

IPv4 uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296
possible unique addresses. However, some are reserved for special purposes such as
private networks (~18 million addresses) or multicast addresses (~1 million addresses).
This reduces the number of addresses that can be allocated as public Internet addresses.
As the number of addresses available are consumed, an IPv4 address shortage appears to
be inevitable, however Network Address Translation (NAT) has significantly delayed
this inevitability.
This limitation has helped stimulate the push towards IPv6, which is currently in the early
stages of deployment and is currently the only contender to replace IPv4.

Allocation :

Originally, the IP address was divided into two parts:

* Network id : first octet

* Host id : last three octets

This created an upper limit of 256 networks. As the networks began to be allocated, this
was soon seen to be inadequate.
To overcome this limit, different classes of network were defined, in a system which later
became known as classful networking. Five classes were created (A, B, C, D, & E), three
of which (A, B, & C) had different lengths for the network field. The rest of the address
field in these three classes was used to identify a host on that network, which meant that
each network class had a different maximum number of hosts. Thus there were a few
networks with lots of host addresses and numerous networks with only a few addresses.
Class D was for multicast addresses and class E was reserved.
Around 1993, these classes were replaced with a Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
scheme, and the previous scheme was dubbed "classful", by contrast. CIDR's primary
advantage is to allow re-division of Class A, B & C networks so that smaller (or larger)
blocks of addresses may be allocated to entities (such as Internet service providers, or
their customers) or Local Area Networks.
The actual assignment of an address is not arbitrary. The fundamental principle of routing
is that address encodes information about a device's location within a network. This
implies that an address assigned to one part of a network will not function in another part
of the network. A hierarchical structure, created by CIDR and overseen by the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and its Regional Internet Registries (RIRs),
manages the assignment of Internet address worldwide. Each RIR maintains a publicly
searchable WHOIS database that provides information about IP address assignments;
information from these databases plays a central role in numerous tools that attempt to
locate IP addresses geographically.

IPv6:

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a network layer protocol for packet-switched

internetworks. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the current version of the Internet
Protocol, for general use on the Internet.
The main improvement brought by IPv6 is a much larger address space that allows
greater flexibility in assigning addresses. While IPv6 could support 2128 (about 3.4‫׳‬
1038) addresses, or approximately 51028‫ ׳‬addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion
people[1] alive today. It was not the intention of IPv6 designers, however, to give
permanent unique addresses to every individual and every computer. Rather, the
extended address length eliminates the need to use network address translation to avoid
address exhaustion, and also simplifies aspects of address assignment and renumbering
when changing providers.

Introduction :

By the early 1990s, it was clear that the change to a classless network introduced a
decade earlier was not enough to prevent IPv4 address exhaustion and that further
changes to IPv4 were needed.[2] By the winter of 1992, several proposed systems were
being circulated and by the fall of 1993, the IETF announced a call for white papers
(RFC 1550) and the creation of the "IP, the Next Generation" (IPng Area) of working
groups.[2][3]
IPng was adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force on July 25, 1994 with the
formation of several "IP Next Generation" (IPng) working groups.[2] By 1996, a series of
RFCs were released defining IPv6, starting with RFC 2460. (Incidentally, IPv5 was not a
successor to IPv4, but an experimental flow-oriented streaming protocol intended to
support video and audio.)
It is expected that IPv4 will be supported alongside IPv6 for the foreseeable future. IPv4-
only nodes (clients or servers) will not be able to communicate directly with IPv6 nodes,
and will need to go through an intermediary

Features of IPv6 :

[edit] To a great extent, IPv6 is a conservative extension of IPv4. Most transport- and
application-layer protocols need little or no change to work over IPv6; exceptions are
applications protocols that embed network-layer addresses (such as FTP or NTPv3).
Applications, however, usually need small changes and a recompile in order to run over
IPv6.

Larger address space :

The main feature of IPv6 that is driving adoption today is the larger address space:
addresses in IPv6 are 128 bits long versus 32 bits in IPv4.
The larger address space avoids the potential exhaustion of the IPv4 address space
without the need for network address translation (NAT) and other devices that break the
end-to-end nature of Internet traffic. NAT may still be necessary in rare cases, but
Internet engineers recognize that it will be difficult in IPv6 and are trying to avoid it
whenever possible. It also makes administration of medium and large networks simpler,
by avoiding the need for complex subnetting schemes. Subnetting will, ideally, revert to
its purpose of logical segmentation of an IP network for optimal routing and access.
The drawback of the large address size is that IPv6 carries some bandwidth overhead
over IPv4, which may hurt regions where bandwidth is limited (header compression can
sometimes be used to alleviate this problem). IPv6 addresses are harder to memorize than
IPv4 addresses, although even IPv4 addresses are much harder to memorize than Domain
Name System (DNS) names. DNS protocols have been modified to support IPv6 as well
as IPv4.
Stateless auto configuration of hosts :

IPv6 hosts can be configured automatically when connected to a routed IPv6 network.
When first connected to a network, a host sends a link-local multicast request for its
configuration parameters; if configured suitably, routers respond to such a request with a
router advertisement packet that contains network-layer configuration parameters.
If IPv6 autoconfiguration is not suitable, a host can use stateful autoconfiguration
(DHCPv6) or be configured manually. Stateless autoconfiguration is only suitable for
hosts: routers must be configured manually or by other means

IPv6 scope :

IPv6 defines 3 unicast address scopes: global, site, and link.

Site-local addresses are non-link-local addresses that are valid within the scope of an
administratively-defined site and cannot be exported beyond it.
Companion IPv6 specifications further define that only link-local addresses can be used
when generating ICMP Redirect Messages [ND] and as next-hop addresses in most
routing protocols.
These restrictions do imply that an IPv6 router must have a link-local next-hop address
for all directly connected routes (routes for which the given router and the next-hop
router share a common subnet prefix).

Links:

Find IP Info: link http://www.ip-adress.com

Find DNS, IPv4, IPv6 : link: http://www.iplobster.com
Find IP Address: link http://www.myip.dk