Summary

IP addresses are an integral part of a network: They form a functional link between user-friendly mnemonics and physical or machine addresses. Translation between mnemonics and IP addresses, and between IP addresses and machine addresses, are functions that most people (including network and system administrators) don't think about. That's both good and bad. The good news is that these functions are obviously working and, therefore, remain invisible to the users and administrators. The bad news is that both functions tend to remain misunderstood. Misunderstanding a network-based function is a recipe for disaster, because you can't diagnose and fix what you don't understand.

This chapter was designed not only to round out your appreciation of these functions, but also to show you their operational context in a network. The next chapter takes this a step further by examining how IP addresses work in an internetwork.