/32 Network Address? 1

[SamBones]

I'm working with someone on a network connectivity issue and they say their source IPs are [tt]aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/32[/tt].

I've never seen a netmask of 32 before. Is that possible? Are they mistaken?

 

[sbcsu]

Yes they are mistaken,
/32 gives a subnet mask of 255.255.255.255 and only 1 usable IP address.
I suspect they meant /23 which gives max 510 addresses using a subnet mask of 255.255.254.0

 

[SamBones]

No, they actually meant /32. It's caused a lot of problems here and I've talked to them to confirm it.

Their explanation is, this is the IP of a cloud environment that they can spin up multiple virtual machines, so the IP a "server" gets is dynamically assigned. Even though they've explained it multiple times, it makes no sense to me.

 

[Arsh Sharma]

A /32 tells you how much of the IP address is being referred to when advertising that route etc.

It is used on web servers running multiple websites where each and every web server is bound to a unique IP address. So, It's an alias for incoming traffic to get them to correct web server and serve the correct website.

http://www.callcenterhosting.in/