Hello,

I am kind of confused here and hence need some help from the experts. I am under the impression that you cannot assign a network address (all zeros) or a broadcast address (all ones) to a host; here is an e.g.:

1)Let say I have a Class A address with a subnet mask of 24: 10.10.10.0/24
2)The network address for the above will be 10.10.10.0
3)The Broadcast address will be 10.10.10.255
4)So the available hosts are 2^8-2 = 126 (excluding 10.10.10.0 and 10.10.10.255).

So can I assign 10.10.10.0 (network address) or 10.10.10.255 (broadcast address) to an interface (eth0; eth1 or any)? I am able to on a CentOS 4.4 (Red Hat flavor) but as far as my knowledge serves I should not be able to. Is that correct?

All your help is much appreciated,

A small correction; I meant 2^8-2 =254 and not 126.

I think the first IP^you can use is 10.10.10.1 and the last 10.10.10.254. Is it mandatory to use 10.10.10.0?

I believe Cisco's official stance is that you can use an IP address that is the same as the subnet zero number, but that it should be avoided because it can cause confusion.