Internet Broadcast Address

[Brien M Patrick_2]

What is the Internet Broadcast Address used for on a nic card in my HP-UX 11i server. The hardware is a RP5430. Is it possible to disable this if possible. What night be the ramifications if this is possible and how might it be done. I've looked on the web-site and inquired with others but I can't seem to get an answer. Thanks, excuse my ignorance.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Broadcast address is used to test network connectivity. It is actually quite useful to make sure all NIC cards on a given segment are able to connect to each other.

You can with the aid of ipfilter fireall disable ping response on one or all of your NIC cards. That means it will probably not respond to broadcasts.

If you want to use the ipfilter firewall for this purpose it will work.

I recommend against any change to actual network configuration in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf

SEP

[David de Beer]

Brien,

Why do you want to disable your broadcast address? Are you recieving strange errors, can ping some hosts in your network, not others?

You can check the following page to verify that your settings are correct.

http://www.subnetmask.info/

David de Beer.

[Brien M Patrick_2]

Thank you both for your answers. It cleared up what I didn't understand