.255 addresses still not usable after all these years?

Sat Jun 14 18:33:21 UTC 2008

On Jun 14, 2008, at 12:26 AM, 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

 From what I recall, Microsoft's stack was based on the only free one  
they could afford back in the Trumpet/Winsock days, namely BSD's.
It is either dependent on how the stack is integrated, or it simply  
implies that BSD's stack is(was) also broken (I'd tend to doubt that).
Also, Vista's stack was supposed to have been re-developed from  
scratch, never checked it.

Greg VILLAIN