Reason for mac addresses and ip12/10/2023 MAC Addresses handle the physical connection from computer to computer while IP Addresses handle the logical routeable connection from both computer to computer AND network to network. So, Computer A could not really learn the MAC Address of Computer 2.Īnd that’s why computers have both MAC Addresses and IP Addresses. However, MAC Addresses are physical and are NOT routeable. Computer A could potentially learn the IP Address of Computer 2. So again, IP Addresses are logical and routeable addresses. It then allows the machines you have physically connected at home to also logically connect to computers on the internet.Īgain, this is simplified, but is easier to understand. It is usually physically connected to the public internet through your cable modem, and then also physically connected to the machines you have at home through blue Cat5 cables or wireless communication technology. The Wireless Router you probably have at home does this job exactly. They are called this because they route messages between different groups of computers. Now, not every computer can send to multiple groups of people, but the ones that can are known as ROUTERS. On a TCP/IP network, why do we use both IP and MAC address In order to answer this question, we need to answer these two questions first. Because Computer C doesn’t know Computer 2 directly, it can ask Computer 3 to send the message to Computer 2.Īnd through this simple message passing, all of the computers A,B,C,1,2, and 3 can talk to each other even though only Computer C and Computer 3 know each other. So, if Computer A wants to send a message to Computer 2, how does it do this? Computer A will send a message to Computer C and ask it to send this message to Computer 2. Computers A, B, C, and Computers 1,2,3.Īnd Computers 1,2, and 3 know each other.īut Computer C, and Computer 3 are special in that they also know each other. What this really means is that the entire internet can play a large game of 6 degrees of separation. What we mean by logical is that IP Addresses are routeable. To get around this physical limitation, they separated computer communication to also contain a logical component, the IP Address. Now imagine, you also needed a physical wire to Seattle to connect to msn.com And now imagine that everyone in the world would need a physical wire just to see a website.Īs you can see, it would physically become very complicated very quickly and the internet would have stayed very small. IP (Logical) Address is the address of the Service running on the Hardware. Imagine if in order to go to you had to have a physical wire connecting your computer out to Palo Alto California, just to see their website. This is a simple answer: Mac (Physical) Address is the address of the Hardware. If every computer in order to communicate with each other needed to be physically connected to each other, all networks either would become complicated very quickly or they would stay small. We know from previous posts that each computer has both an IP Address and a MAC Address assigned to it.
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