I have had just the opposite experience; my local LAN is w.x.48.0/20 , and so I have 15 perfectly good w.x.y.0 and w.x.y.255 addresses other than the wire/broadcast addresses. I have assigned most of them to a variety of machines, and so far the only grok-failure came from Windows95 boxen, which dislike w.x.y.255 . This is not altogether surprising, given MS's notable proficiency in networking... -jrf +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ At 11:41 AM 1/22/98 -0500, Eric Osborne wrote:

In other words, I can't prevent my customers from sending packets to a broadcast address, esp. on a subnet smaller than /24. You might be able to block outgoing packets for destination x.y.z.255, but if you've got a mask >/24 (/23, etc..), couldn't .255 be a valid host address?

Yes, it could be, actually. I tried to use it as WAN pool address once though and it horrendously confused the RAS, as well as several UNIX boxen on the network. ************************************************************** Justin W. Newton voice: +1-650-482-2840 Senior Network Architect fax: +1-650-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net Legislative and Policy Director, ISP/C http://www.ispc.org "The People You Know. The People You Trust." **************************************************************