Module 5: IP Addresses and Ports
IPv4 and IPv6
🏠The everyday picture
A city that numbered houses with only four digits. It worked well, until the city grew too large and ran out of numbers. The fix was a new, much longer numbering system, while the old numbers still work for now.
📘What it really is
-
IPv4 addresses are four numbers from 0 to 255, like
142.250.183.14. That allows about 4.3 billion addresses, which the world has used up. -
IPv6 addresses are much longer, written in hexadecimal with colons, like
2404:6800:4009:82b::200e. There are enough for every device imaginable. -
Both run side by side today. Indian mobile networks use IPv6 heavily.
- You'll mostly see IPv4 when setting up servers and DNS, but hosting dashboards (like Hostinger's) show both.
🖱️Try it
Run ipconfig (Windows) or look in your Wi-Fi details (Mac) again. Do you have an IPv6 address too? It will
look much longer, with colons.
✅Quick check
Why was IPv6 created?
Show the answer
IPv4 ran out of addresses for the growing number of devices.
Is 192.168.1.300 a valid IPv4 address?
Show the answer
No. Each of the four numbers must be between 0 and 255.