Nick Hilliard wrote:
consider three hosts on a broadcast domain: A, B and C. A uses the lowest address, B accepts a lowest address, but C does not. Then A can talk to B, B can talk to C, but C cannot talk to A. This does not seem to be addressed in the draft.
Section 3.4. Compatibility and Interoperability. Many deployed systems follow older Internet standards in not allowing the lowest address in a network to be assigned or used as a source or destination address. Assigning this address to a host may thus make it inaccessible by some devices on its local network segment. [there's more...] If you think that section needs improving, please send suggested text. We're happy to explain the implications better. Joe Maimon <jmaimon@jmaimon.com> wrote:
its a local support issue only.
That's also true. The only issues arise between your devices, on your LAN. Everybody else on the Internet is unaffected and can reach all your devices, including the lowest if your LAN uses it. Nothing forces you to use your lowest address, and we recommend that DHCP servers be configured by default to not to hand them out (no change from how they historically have been configured). We submitted a 6-line patch to the Busybox DHCP implementation in February to avoid hardcoded prevention of issuing a .0 or .255 address (which was wrong anyway, even without our proposal). The default in the config file continues to use a range excluding .0. The patch was merged upstream without trouble. See: https://github.com/schoen/unicast-extensions/blob/master/merged-patches/busy... John