what is a subnet ip address?

vansboy

Hi All!

For some reason I've been prevented from accessing another website forum. The site operator doesn't know why, apparently, but asked for my subnet ip address, to try to lift this restriction.

No idea where to start looking, or even if this is something I shouldn't be looking for!

Thanks in advance!

VB

fwor

From the wiki on subnets (which is directly linked from the wiki on IP addresses):

In computer networks which use the Internet Protocol, a subnetwork or subnet is a range of logical addresses within the address space that is assigned to an organization. Subnetting is a hierarchical partitioning of the network address space of an organization (and of the network nodes of an autonomous system) into several subnets.

Quite why a forum admin would use the term subnet is a bit of a mystery, but it ~could~ be relevant (if he/she were using terminology badly) if they bar access to their forum to IP addresses in certain countries? In which case they would be looking at the first few digits of your IP address (from which your country can be determined).

fwor

Actually, thinking about it further, the cause is more likely to be a spam prevention measure. Organisations like Spamhaus publish IP address ranges which are known to be the source of spam, and other organisations use the list to "blacklist" traffic from those sources.

They are probably wanting the first half of your IP address, to check if it's in their blacklist.

BritBrat

What ISP are you with?

basill

http://whatismyipaddress.com/ will tell you what your IP addess is and a little more info if you are interested.

B

MercilessKiller

If you take the ip address, then do a DNS IP Lookup on it (google) it will tell you the subnet range that it's come from....

Though bit odd for a forum to block an entire subnet...

vansboy

BritBrat wrote: »

What ISP are you with?

I'm on AOL

VB