ZyXEL Communications ENTERPRISE NETWORK CENTER, Manual

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Appendix B IP Addresses and Subnetting
ENC User’s Guide
273
Subnet masks are expressed in dotted decimal notation just like IP addresses. The following
examples show the binary and decimal notation for 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit and 29-bit subnet masks.
Network Size
The size of the network number determines the maximum number of possible hosts you can have
on your network. The larger the number of network number bits, the smaller the number of
remaining host ID bits.
An IP address with host IDs of all zeros is the IP address of the network (192.168.1.0 with a 24-bit
subnet mask, for example). An IP address with host IDs of all ones is the broadcast address for that
network (192.168.1.255 with a 24-bit subnet mask, for example).
As these two IP addresses cannot be used for individual hosts, calculate the maximum number of
possible hosts in a network as follows:
Notation
Since the mask is always a continuous number of ones beginning from the left, followed by a
continuous number of zeros for the remainder of the 32 bit mask, you can simply specify the
number of ones instead of writing the value of each octet. This is usually specified by writing a “/”
followed by the number of bits in the mask after the address.
For example, 192.1.1.0 /25 is equivalent to saying 192.1.1.0 with subnet mask 255.255.255.128.
The following table shows some possible subnet masks using both notations.
Table 136
Subnet Masks
BINARY
DECIMAL
1ST
OCTET 2ND
OCTET 3RD
OCTET
4TH OCTET
8-bit mask 11111111 00000000 00000000 00000000 255.0.0.0
16-bit mask 11111111 11111111 00000000 00000000 255.255.0.0
24-bit mask 11111111 11111111 11111111 00000000 255.255.255.0
29-bit mask 11111111 11111111 11111111 11111000 255.255.255.248
Table 137
Maximum Host Numbers
SUBNET MASK HOST ID SIZE
MAXIMUM NUMBER OF
HOSTS
8 bits 255.0.0.0 24 bits 2
24
– 2 16777214
16 bits 255.255.0.0 16 bits 2
16
– 2 65534
24 bits 255.255.255.0 8 bits 2
8
– 2 254
29 bits 255.255.255.248 3 bits 2
3
– 2 6
Table 138
Alternative Subnet Mask Notation
SUBNET MASK
ALTERNATIVE
NOTATION LAST OCTET
(BINARY) LAST OCTET
(DECIMAL)
255.255.255.0 /24 0000 0000 0
255.255.255.128 /25 1000 0000 128
255.255.255.192 /26 1100 0000 192