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IP Addressing
One of the most important topics in any discussion of TCP/IP is IP addressing. An IP address
is a numeric identifier assigned to each machine on an IP network. It designates the specific
location of a device on the network.
An IP address is a software address, not a hardware address—the latter is hard-coded on
a network interface card (NIC) and used for finding hosts on a local network. IP addressing
was designed to allow hosts on one network to communicate with a host on a different network
regardless of the type of LANs the hosts are participating in.
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