<story><title>All IP addresses are equal? “Dot-zero” addresses are less equal (2013)</title><url>https://labs.ripe.net/author/stephane_bortzmeyer/all-ip-addresses-are-equal-dot-zero-addresses-are-less-equal/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>This is what happens when you make the fresh college hire, who has only ever seen a &amp;#x2F;24, write your network interfaces.  They just assume .0 and .255 are always special.&lt;p&gt;I say this because I was one of those people when I graduated.  At our school every network was &amp;#x2F;24, so 0 and 255 were always reserved.  It was a while before I learned about CIDR and how those addresses may not be reserved.</text></comment>
<story><title>All IP addresses are equal? “Dot-zero” addresses are less equal (2013)</title><url>https://labs.ripe.net/author/stephane_bortzmeyer/all-ip-addresses-are-equal-dot-zero-addresses-are-less-equal/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>schoen</author><text>(2013)&lt;p&gt;You can see quite a lot of these in&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the situation has improved with regard to this specific issue since 2013. I did run some of my own RIPE Atlas tests on this more recently (targeting some of the AWS addresses mentioned above), and it didn&amp;#x27;t look particularly bad at all.&lt;p&gt;Somewhat relatedly, we&amp;#x27;ve been proposing to explicitly allow the lowest address within a subnet to be used to number a host. (This isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily dot-zero, and dot-zero isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily this; they coincide exactly in the specific case of a &amp;#x2F;24 network.)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve gotten patches in Linux and FreeBSD for this, while OpenBSD and NetBSD each independently adopted this behavior some time ago.</text></comment>