On Nov 2, 16:30, Douglas Quebbeman wrote: ;-) 111.0.0.1 :-) It's just a way of explicitly stating what the broadcast address for that interface is. In every legitimate case I can think of, it should be redundant if you provide the netmask (or the netmask is redundant if you give the broadcast address). I'm not sure what happens if they don't match. Maybe that's allowed if you have multiple IP addresses (ip aliases) for the same physical interface, then perhaps you could use a "broader" broadcast address to listen to more than one subnet on the same interface. I don't know. You were about right then, I think! I wasn't having a dig at you! Merely "thinking out loud" and pointing out (in case Arno, for example, didn't see the implications) that there are rather a lot of addresses :-) Even then, it might not work. The range of network addresses from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 are used for multicast, and no ordinary IP software uses those for unicast (normal) or broadcast traffic. Above that, I don;t know of any allocated uses, and things aren't suposed to respond to them at all, which would be a problem if the setting are corrupt in such a way as to fall in that range. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York