CIDR-Block Notation, Classless Subnetting, and Me

OK, I so I now understand CIDR block notation. It has escaped me all this time. Through college, multiple networking courses, multiple instructors and even my own studies. It seems easy enough, but I think I have been my own biggest problem. Gaining the patience to not just get frustrated with it and decide that its the part of the test that I'm just going to have to not understand probably helped. Despite the fact that my notes explain how to get this done properly, I think that in order for me to understand how to do this during a test I'm going to need practical applications. I will use the Cisco Aspire game for that next week.

Binary to Decimal Chart

Binary	Decimal
00000000	0
10000000	128
11000000	192
11100000	224
11110000	240
11111000	248
11111100	252
11111110	254
11111111	255

Converting Subnetting Masks

The Binary to Decimal Chart above provides the key to understanding the binary values and what the decimal of octet would be. The number of 1s in the octet would correlate with a specific decimal. The number of ones in each octet would give you the CIDR block notation. The CIDR block notation would be the number of bits in the network and the number of 0s would be the number of hosts in that network.