Determining the network ID
During my experience within the networking industry, I have seen IT professionals mistakenly configure the incorrect IP address and/or subnet mask on devices within their network. As an aspiring network professional, it’s important to understand how to identify whether devices are on the same IP network or not. Let’s take a look at the following network topology, which contains a computer, a switch, and a router:
Figure 5.8 – Network topology
As shown in the preceding diagram, there’s a small network that contains a computer with a label of PC 1 that has an IPv4 address of 192.168.1.126 that uses a custom subnet mask of 255.255.255.128. On the same network, there’s a router as the default gateway that provides access to the internet, which is configured using an IPv4 address of 192.168.1.129 with a custom subnet mask of 255.255.255.128.
In this scenario, the computer is connected to the same physical...
