IPv4 addresses ending in .0
and .255
are completely valid for ordinary use. This applies to addresses within all of the the RFC1918 address ranges.
TCP/IP subnets used to be defined to be of a particular class. A class C subnet would have 253 addresses available for use, with .0
reserved for the network address, and .255
reserved for the broadcast address. The 192.168.0.0/16
private network was defined to be 256 class C blocks, so none of the .0
or .255
addresses were available for normal use.
This changed with the advent of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in RFC 1519. It became possible to define arbitrary subnets, such as 192.168.4.0/22
.
In the subnet 192.168.4.0/22
, the host ID has 10 bits rather than 8, and the network mask is 255.255.252.0
. The network address is 192.168.4.0
. The broadcast address, with the host bits all set to 1, is 192.168.7.255
. However, inside the 1024 addresses in the subnet’s range are other addresses that end in .255
, and they are not broadcast addresses: 192.168.4.255
, 192.168.5.255
, 192.168.6.255
. Similarly, there are addresses ending in .0
that are not the network address.
The reverse can happen as well. You could define a subnet 192.168.4.0/26
, and the broadcast address on that subnet would be 192.168.4.63
. That address would then not be valid for regular use, even though it doesn’t end in .0
or .255
.
Even if your network is set up so that the routers divide it into /24 blocks, the runZero Explorer has no way to know that, so it scans every IP address. If a response is determined to be a response to a broadcast, it gets ignored. Otherwise, if the explorer gets a response, it records and processes it, even if the address ends in .0
or .255
.
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