Let’s change the pace a little bit, we’ve talked about using the command line to do things, now we’re going to talk about the computer network and IP addresses.  That’s also know as networking.

These days, computers do everything. Planes, trains, automobiles, your house, your phone, everything has computers. Everything is on the network too! You can even buy  light bulbs that you can talk to over a network connection. Isn’t that weird? I can’t wait for my light bulb to message me ‘I’m dying, please replace me.’ I wonder if Batman has network enabled gear yet. Can you imagine his Batmobile sending a message saying ‘My tire is low’. I wonder if it would send that to Alfred instead of Batman…

Anyway, back to the computers doing everything. One important thing to know is that they don’t understand words, they understand numbers. If you tell your phone ‘connect me to the Batmobile’ it won’t understand the word ‘Batmobile’, it has to turn it into a number it will understand. (And if your phone does connect you to the Batmobile, tell me how you did it? I want to talk to it too!)

Those numbers are called IP addresses.  An IP address (also technically called an IPv4 address) is a number between 0 and 4294967296.  Can you imagine having to remember the IP address of your computer if it was just an integer?  2130706433 is an awful number to have to memorize.  Luckily, the geniuses who designed everything came up with dotted quad notation.  It’s a bit mathy (wibble wobble effect here) but instead of memorizing 2130706433, you’d memorize 127.0.0.1.  That’s four numbers to remember with dots in between, which is why they called it dotted quad.

This website has a converter so you can see what the integer is for the IP address of your computer.

But first, you’ve gotta know the IP address of your computer before you can use that website.  There’s a command for that!

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ ip addr show

Try it out and see what you get!