PACKET PARK. AN IPv4 ADVENTURE
NETWORKING, WITHOUT THE HEADACHE

Small town.
Big network.

Four friends. One packet. A whole lot of addresses.
Take the scenic route to understanding IPv4.

Let's send a packet 6 chapters · At your own pace
No networking experience required. Seriously.
SOUTH PARK, COLORADO 192.168.1.0/24
“Dude. Where does this packet even go?”STAN, ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny standing together TO: KYLE A tiny town. A surprisingly good network analogy.
A LITTLE STORY ABOUT HOW THE INTERNET FINDS YOUScroll down. Geek out.

One packet. Six small discoveries.

CHAPTER 01 OF 06
YOUR TURN

A smaller neighborhood.
A different subnet.

Move the boundary between network and host bits. Watch what happens to Stan’s address.

More addressesFewer addresses

A conventional subnet reserves its first address for the network and its last for broadcast. /31 point-to-point links and /32 host routes are special cases, outside this slider.

STAN'S NETWORK
192.168.1.10/24
Network bits Host bits
Subnet mask
255.255.255.0
Network address
192.168.1.0
Broadcast address
192.168.1.255
Usable host addresses
254
Why this works: RFC 4632 ↗
LESS GUESSWORK. MORE RFCs.

The story is fictional.
The networking isn’t.

IPv4 is a network-layer protocol, not a complete networking model. These are the standards behind the adventure.

RFC 791 Internet Protocol↗ RFC 4632 Addresses & CIDR↗ RFC 1812 How routers forward↗ RFC 1918 Private addresses↗ RFC 3022 Network address translation↗
View full reference URLs & artwork credit

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc791
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4632
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1812
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1918
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3022
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc826
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737

Character artwork: StickPNG character illustration ↗. Winter scenery is an original generated illustration. Dialogue is original to this educational story, not quoted from the show.