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Hi,, you can call me a newbie in Networking. Now i am learning and trying to understand the components of ipconfig, like IP address, netmask, DNS etc.. Well, i understood all that but what is broadcast address and what it does ? Is it calculated anyway ? Please help.
You can define a Broadcast Address as a special address used by all the devices in a network. It is a special IP address that allows to send a signal to all computers in a subnet. You may need the Broadcast Address to send a message to all machines on a particular network.The value of a broadcast address should be one that is not likely to be assigned to any one host, such as the addresses consisting of all ones or all zeros in the rest field. If a broadcast address has been set, ipconfig displays the Broadcast flag
A broadcast address is an address used to indicate that information being sent out should be delivered to every client on the local area network. With the help of broadcast address, any device in the network can see the message, open it, and pass it on to the next workstation. Many times the broadcast address will be properly set up by modern operating system once you enter the IP address and subnet mask. The broadcast address for the class C network address n1.n2.n3.0 would be n1.n2.n3.255. A special type of IP broadcast address is 255.255.255.255. It is the broadcast address of the zero network (0.0.0.0) which in Internet Protocol standards stands for this network.
If the PING command is used to a broadcast address, some devices will respond.
The following RFC section discusses pinging a broadcast address:
RFC-1122 Section 3.2.2.6 Echo Request/Reply
"An ICMP Echo Request destined to an IP broadcast or IP multicast address MAY be silently discarded.