Starting off in Computers, like really starting off in computers and digging through my first one, setting up my first home network, playing movies on my computer but outputting to my TV with my Creative Labs 5.1 speakers around my room to be my “theatre” which honestly sounded a lot better than my fathers $8,000 Bose Lifestyles system. It was setting up my first Red Alert: Command and Conquer game that I learned about Static IP’s, DNS, Subnets and Gateway IP’s through Windows. From there, I thought to myself, this isn’t so bad, everything has its own IP, traffic flows from IP to IP, you can have multiple subnets on a single network, its best to have a subnet that defines the amount of systems on that subnet so no extra systems can get on.
At the time, in my mind it was all there was to know. Linux wasn’t a thing yet, business networks weren’t a thing for me yet, nothing more than just the home network was all there was to work with even though there was a hunger inside me to learn more.
Minecraft came along, the theme of myself and this whole website, and it was time to build a dedicated server for my kids. Setting one up on Windows was pretty easy after following their tutorial, but when more than 5 players got on the server, complaints of LAG started to be yelled across the house and garage LAN. Messages on Teamspeak and Discord were flooding my inbox about LAG so it was time to find something better. Turns out, hosting a Minecraft server on Linux server does a pretty good job as it doesn’t have the full Windows suite doing things along side the server.
What does this have to do with CIDR? Here we go… Having lived a life of GUI and being thrown into a CLI, new terms for partitions, file structures, commands, ect. I was forced to take a Linux class at the local community college to get it down. That class and many hours of forum boards, it was finally learned what a CIDR was and how it worked as it is one of the main items to know when setting up any Linux Server.
I learned a CIDR was everything needed to know in Windows IP configurations in one line. The gateway, subnet, range of useable ip’s on the network and how many, to include invisible ip’s that designate the beginning and end. Example, for a basic home network you’ll have, 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254 (useable IP’s), 192.168.1.1 (gateway), 192.168.1.0 network starting ip, 192.168.1.255 network ending ip and 255.255.255.0 (subnet mask in bits).
OR you could write all that in CIDR format:
192.168.1.0/24
(Note: you’ll still have to specify the gateway IP as that uses an ip in the range of useable ip’s.)
Minecraft, another way this game is teaching me about networking, CIDR.