Did Internap lose all clue?

Sat Oct 22 05:13:49 UTC 2011

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:08 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:

> Yes, it's possibly foolish to allocate x.y.z.0 or .255.
>

> But saying that that x.y.z.0 is *not* *capable* of representing an
> interface is
> demonstrating a dangerous lack of knowledge.  There's several totally legal
> .0
> and .255 addresses in each /22 subnet, and yes people *do* use /22 subnets.
> Unfortunately, we're still stuck with  "Don't use .0 or .255, because there
> are
> *still* people out there who don't understand CIDR and will hassle you
> about it"...
>

A decade ago, I recall allocating a /23 to a dialup pool and getting calls
from customers who landed on .0 and .255 because they were unable to reach
random sites.  It should be legal, but doesn't always work.  I assumed this
was still the case.

Several months ago, I fired up a permanent aws ec2 instance with a static
IP.  To my surprise, they allocated me a .0 address.  I haven't noticed any
issues with it at all.  But I figure if Amazon is using .0 as a normal part
of their deployments, their scale is so high that if it didn't work reliably
you'd think they would have noticed by now.  I don't know if they also use
.255.