Understanding Subnetting

In order to work out the Subnet address  you will need for your local networks you will need two things: 

1) your IP address eg:192.168.1.0

2) The Subnet mask 255.255.255.0

If we had a look at the Subnet mask we can see that the network has 3 place holders, which works out to be 8 bits long or  1 octet. 

first step we convert both address into their binary form. 

The blue  numbers represent the octets dedicated to the network while the orange numbers are put aside for the host machines. 

In order to see the subnet address we use an action called the bitwise AND. This works by dropping all the 1's that have both a 1 in the IP address and Subnet mask.

This calculation will give us network address : 11000000.10101000.00000001.00000000

or                                                                     :192.168.1.0

If we wanted to workout the Broadcast address for the network we simply take the host's octet and convert all the 0's to 1's  which will give us: 

Now that we have the Broadcast address we can workout the IP range set aside for the host machines as seen below.

The reason why the Host range is not set to 255 is because the 2 address are used by the Subnet 192.168.1.0 and the broadcast address which is 192.168.1.225. If we removed those addresses from our given range we are left with with a maximum range of 254.