private IP address

How it is used

Used every day in office and home networks. Devices with private IP addresses reach the internet through NAT. Problems appear when two companies, or a home and an office, use the same private range and are joined by a VPN, because the addresses overlap.

Example sentences

1. The printer has a private IP address, so you can't reach it from outside without the VPN.

2. Both offices use 192.168.1.0/24 as their private IP address range, so the VPN between them can't route properly.

Common collocations

• private IP range
• private vs public IP
• RFC 1918 address
• overlapping address ranges

Related terms

• NATShort for network address translation: a method in which a router or firewall rewrites the addresses in packets, typically so that many devices with private addresses can share one public IP address.
• IP addressA unique numerical label given to every device on an IP network so that data can be sent to it, for example 192.168.1.20 in IPv4.
• IPv4Version 4 of the Internet Protocol, which uses 32-bit addresses written as four numbers from 0 to 255 separated by dots, such as 192.168.10.5; it allows about 4.3 billion addresses.
• port forwardingA NAT rule that sends traffic arriving on a public IP address and port to a specific device and port inside a private network, so that an internal service can be reached from outside.
• subnetA smaller range of IP addresses inside a larger network such as a VPC, used to group resources and control which of them can reach the internet.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• private IP address · Networking & Telecommunications

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

• API
• endpoint
• REST
• JSON
• status code
• payload
• authentication
• third-party
• SDK
• breaking change
• request
• response