Can you tell me about IP adresses?

How Stuff Works.

About.

Wikipedia.

In lay terms, it is an address assigned to a computer which it uses to get on a network.

It’s the “address” of your computer.

An IP is like a phone number to your computers hard drive

It’s what I do when I drink a lot of water.

I can’t put it any better than @aprilsimnel did. It’s the address, plain and simple.

You don’t drop a blank envelope in the mailbox and expect it to go to your grandmother. You write her address on it.
Every packet of data you send has the recipient’s IP address, and every packet of data you receive has your IP address on it.
Without the IP address on it, it wouldn’t get to its destination.

They’re completely independent from email addresses, but they are both addresses after all, so they work similarly. Just, differently.

edit: A packet is any piece of data to be sent over the internet, whether it’s an IM, an mp3, a myspace update, character movements in computer games, html files, etc. etc.

i could tell you, but i’d have to kill you.

IP addresses are an address needed to access network resources. (IE: The internet) Computers have to know where to send the information to.

There aren’t enough IPv4 addresses for all of the connected devices in the world. IPv6 is not in widespread use yet.

So, once you’ve gotten the hang of the IP address concept, you get to move on to subnets.

If you want the ultimate address of a device (or one of that device’s NIC cards), then I’d like to introduce you to the MAC address.

So if you have multiple e-mail accounts, they all have the same IP address if they were created on the same computer?

Nope. Email accounts don’t have IP addresses (and the two aren’t directly related at all). IP addresses are only linked to your computer itself, and they’re non-permanent, you’ll typically have a different one every time you turn on your computer.

a different IP address every time you turn on your computer?

are email addresses “permanent” then since I use the same one each time I get on the computer?

By the way, thanks for all the answers and explanations.

You might use the same email address at your computer, but you can use it anywhere in the world, whether you’re home, at college, at work, in India, in Brazil, and whether you’re on your computer, your dad’s computer, college computer, Cybercafe computer, etc.

I’d argue that email addresses are permanently related to you much more than they are permanent to your computer.

(If you have an email address given to you by your internet service provider and have always accessed emails via programs like Outlook or Thunderbird, you may have a slightly more difficult time doing it on other computers just due to how they seem to set up accounts, but nevertheless it is accessible elsewhere)

@basp, it depends on the network admin’s (or ISP’s) preference as to whether you have a static (never changes) or dynamic (changes each time you connect) IP address.

Your computer can also have a hostname, an easy-for-a-person-to-remember name. Like, for example, www . fluther . com. The hostname and IP address of your computer is tracked with a DNS.

So, when you try to connect to www . fluther . com, what really happens is that your PC first asks the DNS for that hostname’s IP address. The DNS responds with 67.207.146.191 (or similar) and that is actually where your communications try to go.

BTW, an email address is incorporates a domain name after the @ sign. There’s an email server listening at that domain. (Refer back to DNS, hostname, IP address covered above).

So when your email comes in as basp @ fluther . com, the email server checks to see if it has a “basp” user. If it does, then the email goes to your inbox. But if not, then an (optional) message might be returned to the sender saying “basp” is not a recognized email account at fluther . com.

I wouldn’t say static ips are never changing, but they are semi-permanent. If I bring my pc to a friend’s house for a LAN party, even if I have a static IP at home, I’ll typically switch to dynamic and get autoassigned there.

@Sarcasm, yup.

Thanks!
You guys are great!

IP stands For Internet Provider address. Its the address in which data is sent from your computer with. If you reset your modem and release your IP (Start, Run CMD, Releaseipconfig) It gives you a new one.

You can see what it is if you go to http://www.myipaddress.com/show-my-ip-address/ It’ll tell you what yours is at the moment. Hope that helps.