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floriferous | 7 years ago

Can someone explain what /8s /16s etc. are? Or a link to a good explainer?

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lolc|7 years ago

It tells you how many of the 32 bits in your IPv4 addresses are fixed. The rest belongs to your space.

In binary, a /8 netmask would look like this: 11111111.00000000.00000000.00000000 and a /16 would look like this: 11111111.11111111.00000000.00000000

So 3.0.0.0/8 means only the first eight bits are fixed. Which gives Amazon 2^24 IP-Addresses to use (32-8 bit). That is huge because it's 1/256 of all available IPv4 addresses. It is small because it's only 16777216 addresses.

zimmund|7 years ago

They are subnetwork masks! It's a formal way of expressing in which range you will find the addresses of a given network (for example: 3.0.0.0/8 is like saying "3.x.x.x addresses"; or, for common home networks you will find something like 192.168.1.0/24, which means "192.168.1.x"). I'm not an expert on the subject, but this site seems to have a complete explanation: http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/subnetting-subnet-masks...