Anyone who works in networking will, at some point, work with the Internet Protocol (IP), as it is responsible for delivering data over a network. For that reason, it's important to have a solid understanding of the IP. In this chapter, we'll take a closer look at the IP, which is responsible for two key roles: addressing and routing data. 

To strengthen your analytical skills, we'll start with a thorough overview of IPv4 and IPv6 and examine the header format of each protocol. You'll begin to understand how the field values in each of the versions compare and contrast, along with the significance of each of the fields. Since addressing is an important concept, we'll examine the use of special and private IPv4 addressing. In addition, we'll compare the different address types used in IPv6.

So that you can learn how to customize IPv4 and IPv6 in Wireshark, we'll evaluate the protocol preferences. Finally, because IPv4 is a completely different format to IPv6, we'll investigate how the two can coexist by using various tunneling protocols when in a dual stack environment.

This chapter will address all of this by covering the following:

• Understanding the purpose of the IP
• Outlining IPv4
• Exploring IPv6
• Editing protocol preferences
• Discovering tunneling protocols