[105187] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: .255 addresses still not usable after all these years?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jared)
Fri Jun 13 19:01:45 2008
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:01:28 -0500
From: Jared <nanog@namor.ca>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <4852F431.8060209@rockynet.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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...
