Bruce's right, just having the least significant octet of an IPv4 address doesn't make it a network address. It's a perfectly valid host address - just that some older equipment has broken firmware that assumes that anything ending with a .0 is a network address and anything ending with a .255 is a broadcast address.
For one thing, on a network like, say, 192.168.252.208/28 network, the broadcast address is 192.168.252.223 and the network address is 192.168.252.208.
On a network like, say, 10.0.0.0/8, 10.0.0.255 is not a broadcast address; it's just another IP address. Also, a non-broken node on the network can have its IP address set to 10.0.0.0 and will work just fine, as long as other equipment it communicates with isn't broken. Similarly, the router doesn't have to be 10.0.0.1; it could be 10.0.0.172 for all anyone cares.
It sounds like people here haven't gotten used to CIDR/classless networks, and are sticking to /8, /16 and /24 networks, which CIDR supercedes.
(Credentials matter? If they do, I maintain and optimize network stack software for routers.)
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Squirrel,
169.254.0.0/16 is the APIPA netblock, which Windows 98 and higher systems use IP addresses from if they fail to get one via DHCP, so they can interoperate over an IPv4-based LAN even if they cannot get a DHCP lease.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Prototyped on 2002-03-08 17:32 ]</font>