Options
what's the effect of assigning broadcast address as ip addre
newbienewb
Member Posts: 19 ■□□□□□□□□□
what's the effect of assigning broadcast address as ip address?
I work as a junior network administrator and just now joined this office.Here I found an ip address 192.168.1.255 assigned to a computer.
I am not yet allowed to change ip addresses.But I can suggest them to not to use further;
To convey them in non-technical terms, how may I say the disadv. of using this ip address;
Note: default subnet mask is used and all computers belong to single subnet,though DMZ ip addresses are also there, which are public ip addresses.
I work as a junior network administrator and just now joined this office.Here I found an ip address 192.168.1.255 assigned to a computer.
I am not yet allowed to change ip addresses.But I can suggest them to not to use further;
To convey them in non-technical terms, how may I say the disadv. of using this ip address;
Note: default subnet mask is used and all computers belong to single subnet,though DMZ ip addresses are also there, which are public ip addresses.
Comments
-
OptionsDanman32
Member Posts: 1,243
As you said, it is a subnet broadcast address. Since you are using the default subnet mask, and it is a class C address, even routers not configured for VLSM would consider this a broadcast.
For a quick answer, it may work for most circumstances, and I emphasize may, but you may get unpredictable results in other circumstances that may be critical to your environment.
I am suprised that the host machine even accepted this address. This host would probably be unreachable. It certainly would not be reachable by unicast.
You might be getting away with it though because as a broadcast, this host will receive the packet over ethernet, even though the ethernet destination MAC address would be broadcast. However, all other hosts are receiving and accepting it also. At best this leads to wasted bandwidth (switches would have to pass this address to all ports as it will be sent as an ethernet broadcast), and wasted processing utilization on all hosts on this subnet, since they have to process the false broadcast.
At worst all the hosts on your lan may get confused by a unicast protocol message sent as a broadcast. Some protocols might get confused by broadcast, or may never receive the message in the first place as the lower layers of the OSI model may reject the packet.
But I have seen wierd configurations actually work, though they should not, like having a router with an interface given an IP that is different than the subnet it's attached to.