[105184] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Lewinski)
Fri Jun 13 18:27:58 2008
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:26:57 -0600
From: Mike Lewinski <mike@rockynet.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <FCD26398C5EDE746BFC47F43EA52A17303252D09@dino.ad.hostasaurus.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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
