Private vs public IP addresses in Computer Networks - Hands-On Comparison

Understanding Private vs Public IP Addresses

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a small office network and need to understand how devices inside your office communicate with each other and with the internet.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple data structure that lists devices with their IP addresses, identify which IPs are private or public, and mark them accordingly.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with device names as keys and their IP addresses as values.

Add a list of private IP address ranges to check against.

Write logic to determine if each device's IP address is private or public.

Add a final dictionary that shows each device with its IP and whether it is private or public.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Understanding private vs public IP addresses helps in setting up secure home or office networks and managing internet access.

💼 Career

Network administrators and IT support staff need to know how to identify and configure private and public IP addresses for devices.

1

Create the devices dictionary with IP addresses

Create a dictionary called devices with these exact entries: 'Laptop': '192.168.1.10', 'Printer': '10.0.0.5', 'WebServer': '172.16.0.1', 'PublicSite': '8.8.8.8'.

Computer Networks

# Create the devices dictionary with exact IP addresses
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with device names as keys and IP addresses as string values.

2

Add the private IP ranges list

Create a list called private_ranges containing these exact strings: '192.168.', '10.', and '172.16.'.

Computer Networks

devices = {
    'Laptop': '192.168.1.10',
    'Printer': '10.0.0.5',
    'WebServer': '172.16.0.1',
    'PublicSite': '8.8.8.8'
}

# Create the private_ranges list with exact prefixes
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list of strings representing the start of private IP address ranges.

3

Determine if each IP is private or public

Create a dictionary called ip_types that uses a for loop with variables device and ip to iterate over devices.items(). For each IP, check if it starts with any prefix in private_ranges. If yes, set the value to 'Private', otherwise 'Public'.

Computer Networks

devices = {
    'Laptop': '192.168.1.10',
    'Printer': '10.0.0.5',
    'WebServer': '172.16.0.1',
    'PublicSite': '8.8.8.8'
}

private_ranges = ['192.168.', '10.', '172.16.']

# Create ip_types dictionary to mark IPs as 'Private' or 'Public'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop and the startswith() method with any() to check prefixes.

4

Combine devices, IPs, and types into a final dictionary

Create a dictionary called device_info using a dictionary comprehension that iterates over devices.items(). Each key is the device name, and the value is another dictionary with keys 'IP' and 'Type' set to the device's IP and its type from ip_types.

Computer Networks

devices = {
    'Laptop': '192.168.1.10',
    'Printer': '10.0.0.5',
    'WebServer': '172.16.0.1',
    'PublicSite': '8.8.8.8'
}

private_ranges = ['192.168.', '10.', '172.16.']

ip_types = {}
for device, ip in devices.items():
    if any(ip.startswith(prefix) for prefix in private_ranges):
        ip_types[device] = 'Private'
    else:
        ip_types[device] = 'Public'

# Create device_info dictionary with device as key and {'IP': ip, 'Type': type} as value
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension to combine IP and type info for each device.