nanog mailing list archives
Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years?
From: bmanning () vacation karoshi com
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 05:07:15 +0000
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 03:08:47PM -0400, David Hubbard wrote:
I remember back in the day of old hardware and operating systems we'd intentionally avoid using .255 IP addresses for anything even when the netmask on our side would have made it fine, so I just thought I'd try it out for kicks today. From two of four ISP's it worked fine, from Verizon FIOS and Road Runner commercial, it didn't. So I guess that old problem still lingers? David
well... .0 and .255 are still special in -some- contexts. they still form the all-zeros and all-ones broadcast addresses for the defined block... so: 192.168.16.0/23 192.168.16.0/32 is unusable 192.168.16.255/32 is useable 192.168.17.0/32 is useable 192.168.17.255/32 is unuseable. crapy CPE, vendor instruction, poor software all contribute to VLSM being poorly understood and these "gotchas" still around - years - later. my recommendation... place your caching nameservers and webservers on these addresses... if you want to force the issue. :) --bill
Current thread:
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years?, (continued)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Mark Smith (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Tim Durack (Jun 13)
- RE: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Ian Henderson (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? David Coulson (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Florian Weimer (Jun 14)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Mike Lewinski (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Mike Lewinski (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? William Allen Simpson (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Jared (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Greg VILLAIN (Jun 14)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Mike Lewinski (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? bmanning (Jun 13)
- Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years? Scott Weeks (Jun 14)