Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: IP numbers that end in 0 ... Message-ID: Date: 28 Aug 90 14:35:26 GMT Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 12 I have adopted the habit of avoiding using as host addresses anything that, in any 8-bit aligned piece of the "host part" of an IP address, are 0x00, 0x01, 0xFE, or 0xFF. Such addresses may well be legal, particuarly when correctly interpreted in light of non-8bit subnet masking, but there's always the odd machine out there who wants to take things differently. If there will ever be disagreements they will be in the boundary conditions. It's quicker and easier to avoid problems in advance than to cite RFCs at the new box on the network. An exception can be observed in my adopted convention of numbering "things that are only gateways and perform no other `host' functions" as host 0x01. This hasn't yet proved to be a problem.