Ever have one of those things you have to look up over and over again? Private IP address ranges are one of those things.
I recall once working with someone who just thought 172.16.x.x worked, so 172.WHATEVER would work just fine… so they made a private network like 172.50.x.x, or something like that… and would just have weird periodic interruptions, strange network behavior, etc. All until they realized they had accidentally used a Public IP range for their private network. It’s not like it caused constant issues, but just enough to be difficult.
So, more than 15 years after that incident, I figured it was time I just tucked this away for future reference. At least this way I won’t end up having to search it up online and have some search engine inevitably burn down a rainforest to query an AI something that is already in its search indexes anyway.
These are the ranges that can be safely used for your private networks:
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 (65,536 IP addresses)
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 (1,048,576 IP addresses)
169.254.0.0 – 169.254.255.255 (65,536 IP addresses)
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255 (16,777,216 IP addresses)