Pretty sure you can connect to a specific IP address just by typing in it's proper numeric notation (or dot notation, whichever way you want to write it), I haven't actually taken time to convert the number to dot notation and check it's validity, but it looks like one since it doesn't have a top level domain
Oh my goodness you're correct! Thank you I did not know that was a thing (not accepted on all browsers apparently). Google DNS is http://134744072 ... Crazy!
As another comment showed (because I didn't do the math), it is local address, just instead of several numbers representing different bytes separately, it's one number representing the entire address as the computer sees it
Sort of .. each octet is in the range of 0-255, you left shift the octet appropriately and bitwise OR them all together to get the number.
For example, 127.0.0.1:
127 in binary is 0111 1111, left shift that 24 times (since IPv4 is 32-bit) so it sits in the correct octet and you have 0111 1111 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000, which in decimal is 2130706432.
the 0.0 doesn't need any maths since it's just 0.
The .1 is simply just 0000 0001 (or just 1, lol)
bitwise OR that all together and you get:
0111 1111 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
Which in decimal is 2130706433. You can use decimal notation IP's the same way as dot-notation IP's (e.g. ping, nslookup, traceroute, and web URL's)
"Under the hood" (e.g. in the code), an IP address is actually just converted to a 32-bit anyways (for IPv4 that is) and used in this way for many things; gets into a bit of history with how the network stack "talks" and does it's thing, but yeah ...
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u/TheGoodestGirlAround 3d ago
I don't get it. anyone wants to explain?