Well, RFC 1812 is only a _proposed_ standard, and the RFC 1716 which it
supplants was only an _informational_ RFC.  

Anyway, as the originator of this whole discussion, let me add only that
when I finally got to talk to someone clue-ful at my ISP, they informed
me that I really should be using a /24 mask, not /28, so I can now
access my router!

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Kevin Lahey wrote:

> In message <v6909j20es.fsf@kechara.flame.org>Michael Graff writes
> >Olaf Seibert <rhialto@polder.ubc.kun.nl> writes:
> >
> >> Yes, but host 0 still means "this host" or "unknown host" doesn't it? So
> >> it would still not be a valid host address.
> >
> >0.0.0.0 means "this host" often enough, but to my knowledge noone has
> >been assigned a prefix where all the bits are 0 :)
> >
> >204.152.186.0 should be a legal host, though.
> 
> I looked around a bit, and found only this reference in RFC 1812:
> 
>     IP addresses are not permitted to have the value 0 or -1 for the
>     <Host-number> or <Network-prefix> fields except in the special cases
>     listed above.  This implies that each of these fields will be at
>     least two bits long.
> 
> The "special classes listed above" are all zeros, and all zeros
> only for the network portion of the address;  both are to be used
> for configuring addresses.
> 
> I'd love to hear if there are more recent RFCs describing this;
> it certainly seems like it'd be nice to be able to use those extra
> addresses.
> 
> Kevin
> kml@novell.com
> 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Paul Goyette      | PGP DSS Key fingerprint:   | E-mail addresses:     |
| Network Engineer  |   BCD7 5301 9513 58A6 0DBC |  paul@whooppee.com    |
| and kernel hacker |   91EB ADB1 A280 3B79 9221 |  pgoyette@juniper.net |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------