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A public IP address is a globally routable unicast IP address, meaning that the address is not an address reserved for use in private networks, such as those reserved by RFC 1918, or the various IPv6 address formats of local scope or site-local scope, for example for link-local addressing. Public IP addresses may be used for communication ...
Used for link-local addresses [5] between two hosts on a single link when no IP address is otherwise specified, such as would have normally been retrieved from a DHCP server 172.16.0.0/12 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255
Of the approximately four billion addresses defined in IPv4, about 18 million addresses in three ranges are reserved for use in private networks. Packets addresses in these ranges are not routable in the public Internet; they are ignored by all public routers. Therefore, private hosts cannot directly communicate with public networks, but ...
A special case of private link-local addresses is the loopback interface. These addresses are private and link-local by definition since packets never leave the host device. IPv4 reserves the entire class A address block 127.0.0.0 / 8 for use as private loopback addresses. IPv6 reserves the single address ::1.
Some large / 8 blocks of IPv4 addresses, the former Class A network blocks, are assigned in whole to single organizations or related groups of organizations, either by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), or a regional Internet registry.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. [77] IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed in 1981 to address up to ≈4.3 billion (10 9) hosts.
While IPv4 allows for a theoretical maximum of 2 32 addresses (approximately 4.3 billion), the number available for public use is smaller due to reserved blocks for private and special purposes. [ 2 ]
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has reserved the IPv4 address block 169.254.0.0 / 16 (169.254.0.0 – 169.254.255.255) for link-local addressing. [1] The entire range may be used for this purpose, except for the first 256 and last 256 addresses (169.254.0.0 / 24 and 169.254.255.0 / 24), which are reserved for future use and must not be selected by a host using this dynamic ...