Introduction
If you’ve read through countless papers on TCP/IP and understand most of what you’ve read and yet subnetting still remains an enigmatic process, then this paper is for you. After reading this article, you should be able to do subnetting mostly in your head.The purpose of this paper is to simplify the subnetting process, nothing more.
Understanding What Subnetting Actually Does
What makes subnetting seem difficult to understand is its not physically tangible; all too often it’s presented as a mathematical equation “you just have to learn”. This paper is an adjunct of the three part video series explaining the 6 step subnetting process found at www.youtube.com/vegasrage inside are exercises you can work out for yourself allowing you to walk through each step so you can make subnetting easy for yourself. We’ll first show how to determine your hosts and networks the easy way which is the core of 6 step process, then we’ll do basic subnetting, then Variable Length Subnet Masking (VLSM).
To me it seems the most fundamental concept in teaching subnetting is almost always overcomplicated, and that is people seem to forget they are just counting in binary. Every electronic bit has just two possible values “on” or “off” (numerically “0” or “1”) and counting the “possible” values in binary is just a matter of counting in powers of 2 which is nothing more than the process of doubling each answer by it’s own value 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc. If you’ve been racking your brain trying to figure out how to subnet then you have used the 8-bit template in Figure 1 to determine the “actual” binary value is within an octet.
In determining the actual value you only count the bits which are turned on by adding up the turned on place values as shown.
