broadcasthost?

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Level 1

75 points

broadcasthost?

Apologies if i've posted in the wrong place. I've become more and more curious about the inner workings of my mac- can anyone explain to me what broadcasthost is does? Thanks

mac pro, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 22, 2009 11:17 AM

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Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

728,039 points

Jul 22, 2009 11:28 AM in response to tmx3

It is a single address which represents all machines on the network; data sent to it is treated as if it was sent to all available computers. Click here for more information.

(45786)

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

54,369 points

Jul 22, 2009 11:30 AM in response to tmx3

broadcasthost is simply the last IP address in your subnet.

For example, if your Mac has an IP address of 192.168.1.2 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 then the last IP address in the subnet, and the broadcasthost is 192.168.1.255

Any traffic sent to broadcasthost is automatically passed to every device in the subnet. For example:

Ping a specific machine in the network:

ping 192.168.1.5

Ping every device (one way to see what's out there):

ping 192.168.1.255

or

ping broadcasthost

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Answer 3

Jul 22, 2009 11:54 AM in response to Camelot

And if it wasn't clear from the other replies here (and the pointers included with same), this is Internet Protocol (IP) networking, and every host participating on an IP network has knowledge of the network mask, the IP host address, the broadcast mask, and the default IP gateway host. This mechanism isn't specific to Mac OS X client nor to Mac OS X Server, this is one of the aspects of IP networking.

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