.255 and .0 addresses

--On dimanche 12 septembre 2004 20:14 +0100 Jon Lawrence <jon at lawrence.org.uk> wrote:

> Without doubt, the pools must be bigger than /24 in order for .0 or .255 to be 
> used as host addresses. Never tried it personally, but I can see no reason 
> why .0.255 or .1.0 wouldn't be usable in a .0.0/23 - obviously assuming that 
> you pass /23 to the hosts as a netmask.

Our experience as ISP proved that you don't want to allocate .0 and .255 addresses to your
customers: stats reveal lower rates and lower connection times for those customers.
We assumed that was due to the windows TCP/IP stack, and we have proved the Cisco stack to be
culprit some times, sending other customers broadcast frames to the unfortunate .255

Since then we've definitely stopped allocating .0 and .255 addresses, no problem anymore.

--
Jerome Fleury     Tiscali France
Network Engineer  Tel: +33 1 45082314