North American Network Operators Group
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Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years?

  • From: Jared
  • Date: Fri Jun 13 19:01:32 2008
Mike Lewinski wrote:
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?

The TCP/IP stack in Windows XP is broken in this regard, possibly in Vista as well, though I've yet to have the displeasure of finding out. I have a router with a .255 loopback IP on it. My Windows XP hosts cannot SSH to it. The specific error that Putty throws is "Network error: Cannot assign requested address".

At least if I ever need to completely protect a device from access by Windows users, I have a good option :)

Mike

We had to split our assigned ranges (PPP/PPPoE) into /24, even if it were assigned to the (NAS, BRAS, etc) in larger chunks. It seems customers who were assigned the .0/.255 could get out there - but certain sites (IIS it seemed) would refuse to talk back.

I forget if I tested microsoft.com like this...