Addressing

This section explains concepts regarding the Network Address Translation (NAT) protocol and introduces the differences between the IPv4 and IPv6 formats.

NAT

This mechanism makes the traffic from the private network appear to be coming from a single valid public internet address, which effectively hides the private addresses from the internet. If you inspect the output of ip addr or ipconfig/all commands, then you will find that your devices are using private range addresses, which would have been assigned to them by your DHCP server or by your router through DHCP address dynamic assignment.

The private address ranges that are usually assigned are as follows:

• 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
• 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255...